A Survivor's Log
by WingedPanther73
Summary: A person shows up in the Minecraft world... with a little bit of assistance available.
1. Stranded in Block Land

Title: A Survivor's Log

Author: WingedPanther73

Pairing(s)/Characters: Player

Rating: PG-13

Summary: A person shows up in the Minecraft world... with a little bit of assistance available.

Warnings: None

Disclaimer: Minecraft, its names and characters belong to Mojang.

Beta Reader: Sybil Rowan

Waking up the first morning, alone, in the middle of a jungle, was the worst experience. I found myself with a strange device, kind of like a tablet. A quick check revealed a GPS device with x-y-z coordinates, and a wiki about my whereabouts. It advised me to start collecting wood, and be ready to find shelter before nightfall.

"Great!" I muttered. I was stranded with nothing but a freaking guide that tells me I should start taking out trees with my bare hands. It seemed stupid, but after beating against the nearest tree, I was able to get a section of wood out from it to spare my knuckles on the next section. Strangely enough, the tree didn't fall. The damned thing just hung there, suspended in midair, waiting for me to take chunks out of it.

The tree gave me five hunks of wood and a couple saplings. I planted one where I had removed the tree, and proceeded to convert the five hunks of wood into twenty planks. I turned two of them into four sticks, and four more into a crafting table. I promptly set it down, and surveyed my tools: four sticks and fourteen planks. There was no help for it, my gizmo told me I needed an axe and pickaxe, and all I had was wood to get started. I soon found myself with those and the remaining eight planks.

I put my axe through some abuse getting the crafting table pried up again, and killed about a third of its durability taking down two more trees for later. Strangely enough, taking out the tree limbs seemed to do more damage to it than taking down the trunk. I'd worry about that later. I replanted the trees and headed for a hill I could see in the distance.

It was already noon by the time I reached the hill. A quick experiment showed the pickaxe worked faster on rocks than dirt. I'd worry about that later. I needed to create a cavern I could shelter in for the night. As I dug into the rock face, I kept an eye out for any coal I might find. Having some torches would be nice, so I could dig deeper into the ground.

I was quickly able to establish a cavern that would do as a base of operations. I planted my crafting table and made a stone pickaxe to speed up the process, my wooden one having given up rather quickly. I quickly scanned around for any sign of coal, but found none. I had to make do with partially blocking the entrance to my base with some cobblestone and watching the night sky.

Spending the night hiding in a small cavern, peeking out at the goings on of the dark, was unnerving, at best. Zombies began to appear out of nowhere, and I soon had to duck out of sight of skeletons wielding bows and arrows. The worst part, however, was listening to them moan as the night went on. I didn't expect to get any sleep at all.

I had a chance to reflect on my circumstances. I wasn't tired. Understand, I'd probably worked harder on that first day than I had the entire rest of my life, yet I wasn't tired at all. I was starting to get hungry, but it was mild enough that I felt I could stand to wait another day before worrying about it. I was at the peak of an ice mountain. Around me were ice plains with a decent population of cattle and sheep. There was tons of tall grass around that could be harvested to start growing wheat.

I spent the night reading, since I couldn't seem to get to sleep. I wouldn't be able to sleep without making a bed, and it seemed I didn't actually need sleep. I could worry about that later. I needed to find coal the next day, or harvest enough wood to afford to make charcoal. I also needed to start setting up a farm in my base, along with trees on top of my base.

With dawn, I peaked out of my base to see zombies and skeletons catching on fire. Soon, they had died. I was able to harvest some bones and arrows from the skeletons. Next, I grabbed enough seeds from long grass to start a small farm. I even found a couple pumpkins.

Next, a small cavern caught my eye. I was able to go through it and harvest some coal for torches. I quickly returned to my base and created a small wheat farm in the chamber I'd carved out. I made a pumpkin patch next to it, and set up torches inside.

It was time to sit down and read. My wiki told me that I needed to mine for resources. I needed coal, iron, and a lot of defenses to stay safe. Unfortunately, I was also going to encounter caverns as I dug in that would have more monsters to deal with. There would be more lava, like the lava pool outside my door, and a great chance of getting lost.

I made the decision: I would be methodical. I would hollow out this mountain, and work my way down to bedrock, creating a pillar of chambers as I worked down. I would extract every bit of minerals I could, and ensure that I missed nothing. Once done, I could build out from that shaft, acquiring more resources as I went. Meanwhile, I'd grow the cattle, sheep, and chicken flocks outside with the crops I was growing.

The plan started well enough. Bonemeal from skeletons kick-started my wheat harvest, letting me get cattle and sheep herds larger. Digging also went well. I soon had more dirt for growing wheat, and I had three trees on top of my hill providing wood. I could survive on steak, bread, and the occasional apple. I even found myself with a decent amount of iron and a nice bed.

As expected, at around 45 meters above bedrock, I ran into the exact issue I'd expected. While clearing out a level, I removed a piece of stone and saw a large chamber on the other side. Worse, I could hear the sounds of a spider someplace inside the chamber. If I went into that chamber, two things were likely to happen. First, I would probably find a wealth of minerals easily accessible. Second, I would probably get lost.

Despite the temptation of easy riches, I stuck with my plan. I opened up a hole on what would be my wall, and extended it across the chasm, walling off half the chamber from where I was working. I then quickly extended the floor across the hole below me. I would encounter it again on my next level, but that was fine. I would repeat the procedure, as needed. By being careful, I was able to criss-cross the passageway, claiming a section of it for my own.

When I hit 15 meters above bedrock, I encountered a larger problem: lava pools. My first thought was simple, I had a bunch of iron, I could use that to make buckets and collect the lava out of the pools. Actually, the thought of using an IRON bucket to scoop up LAVA kind of bothered me. My wiki assured me it would work. I tried it... and it did. I had ten buckets of lava that I was carrying around with me, unharmed. This place was weird.

I got ten buckets of lava collected. At that point, I was out of buckets, and still had a huge pool of lava in the chamber I wanted to claim as my own. The only solution I could think of was to fill in the pool with cobblestone. I knew that what SHOULD happen was that the lava would be displaced, and I would kill myself. Instead, it just replaced the lava.

Working carefully, I managed to fill in almost the entire lava pool, and then disaster struck. A creeper snuck up on me and detonated, killing me. As my eyesight faded, I saw my armor, and other equipment, scattered about me. I had been so close, and it was over.

I woke up at the top of my base in my bed. While I ran down to my scattered equipment, I pondered this strange circumstance. I had died. My body had been blown to pieces. Despite that, I was now whole, healthy, and charging down to a lava pit in the hopes that my equipment would be there, and that I could get it in order before anything else showed up to ruin my day. It was a truly surreal experience.

I found my equipment, and was pleased to see none had fallen into the lava. Unfortunately, a zombie had appeared near it. I grabbed my equipment and retreated. The zombie followed, unfortunately. I retreated up several levels and quickly put on my armor, and placed my sword in hand. As the zombie approached, I was able to kill it.

New priority. I sealed off the chamber in the corner of my room. I wouldn't be getting snuck up on again by creatures bent on killing me. With that done, I was able to finish filling in the lava pools. Now all I needed to do was work on level 12.

Level 12 soon gave me a scare: It turned out I had NOT filled in all the lava. I was working on the chamber, when lava suddenly started pouring into the chamber. After beating a hasty retreat, I managed to use cobblestone to wall off the spill, and eventually replace the source pocket with cobblestone. I now found myself in a narrow space that I wanted to expand out to be my chamber for this level.

I found myself working very nervously, expecting lava to burst out at any moment, killing me if I wasn't quick enough to dash away. I ended up creating channels the lava could flow into, and slowly working forward. I ran into several more pockets, and uncovered more lava in the floor, but managed to safely clear the chamber.

Moving to level 9, I quickly found my vision behaving strangely. I found myself unable to see more than about ten meters away. I found myself suffering from extreme paranoia. Worse, there were particles of darkness emanating from the floor. I wasn't sure whether there were any lava pockets left over, too. I slowly worked, creating channels to protect myself.

I finished up the process, with several chunks of diamond and a bunch of lapis to my name. I had a few hunks of gold that I couldn't think of a good use for. The lava buckets, on the other hand, could be useful for making a nether portal. I crafted the obsidian frame near the top of my base, and lit it. Now I find myself in hell, exposed, in the open.


	2. Through the Gates of Hell

I think it's important for you to understand: I didn't just hop through that nether portal, I did some research on the place. It has ghasts, zombie pigmen, and assorted other critters. The zombie pigmen would be easy to deal with: just don't attack any of them. Ghasts would be pretty easy to deal with as well, by simply building up walls of cobblestone to protect myself. I had plenty of that from mining out a mountain.

All of that planning just kinda went downhill when I stepped through the portal and found myself on an exposed ledge of netherrack overlooking a large chamber. There was no cover at all. I could see a blaze in the distance and a few ghasts floating about. It's at times like this that you realize you've made a serious mistake: I only had a couple piles of cobblestone, but I started throwing up a wall to hide from the ghasts. I quickly built up a small room of cobblestone and fled back to the overworld.

I grabbed all the cobblestone I could hold, and went back. It seemed like the best approach was to slowly work my way down to bedrock again, and then build out from there. Working about ninety blocks down should do the job. Don't ask me how the GPS was working in a completely different dimension. I don't get it either.

My plan got derailed when I had worked my way down about ten blocks. I broke through the ceiling of a nether fortress. Worse, while attempting to secure my position in it, a whither skeleton ambushed me. I made a decision right then: I was going to claim this space for my own... with two meter high ceilings.

I was able to claim most of the nether fortress for my own. I killed a few blazes, and even got a blaze rod in the process. I had used up about a quarter of my collected cobblestone, gathered a nice collection of glowstone dust and soul sand, when I found my overworld base invaded by three zombie pigmen.

Understand, if I were in the nether, I wouldn't touch them, no matter what. I don't need to be swarmed by hordes of zombie pigmen. Here, however, there were just three. How bad could it end up? I'd killed one by itself a little while ago.

I swung my sword, and they charged. A few seconds later, my fading eyesight saw one of the pigmen putting on MY iron armor. I resurrected just outside the top of my base, entered, and was ambushed by another zombie pigman. I resurrected on the other side of the door again. This was NOT looking good.


	3. Becoming a God

After a couple rounds of getting killed by the hostile zombie pigmen, I decided to stay outside. My base had a second entrance below where the pigmen were, and a second crafting table, furnace, etc. My first priority was to get some wood. I dove into my second entrance and ran down two long sets of stairs.

I had enough iron to make a breastplate. Good. With that, I'd stand a better chance of surviving. I slowly moved back upstairs, making sure I hadn't been followed. I was ambushed by the original zombie pigman that had stolen my armor, but he died with one swipe. I guess I'd nearly killed him in the first encounter. The rest were gone.

Fully armored up, I went back through the portal. A short distance into my nether base, I was ambushed and killed again. I made a decision at that moment, as I resurrected in my bed, yet again. I would brick up the portal and rebuild my resources. This was going to be a long, boring process. It would expand my underground strip mine, using doors to separate the main channel from expansion rooms.

The plan is simple: mine until I have enough diamond armor, weapons, etc to go back to the nether and kick ass. In the process, I built a massive underground wheat farm. With stacks of bread to my name, there was no need to go outside for anything except wood.

I mined. Deeply. I managed to accumulate tons of cobblestone, dirt, and iron. When I found a huge lava lake, though, I finally got tired of the whole process. I'd been awake for a solid month, and what did I have to show for it? I had single-handedly mined out a massive mountain all the way down to bedrock, but to what purpose?

As I sat and read my wiki, it discussed the various creations that were possible with the the mounds of redstone I'd accumulated. There were videos of massive wheat farms, casinos, and even the ability to fly! As for me, I was stuck in this crummy place, unable to do anything except hide from everything, and trip into lava like an idiot.

Instead, I found myself wishing I was on one of those flat worlds, invulnerable, able to fly. Someplace with infinite resources, where I could do as I saw fit and ignore the creatures around me. As I closed my eyes, I could almost see the vast expanse of green grass that would have been so ideal. I could be a god, instead of a miserable cretin hiding in a mountain like a little mole. I could build the fantastic structures I had only read about and seen videos of.

As I opened my eyes, that world lay before me. I had somehow transported to a new land, a flat land. I jumped in the air for joy... and didn't fall! It was a miracle! With quick experimenting, I found I could will forth whatever I could imagine! I could destroy bedrock with a single punch!

I built a few redstone circuits, getting the hang of it, but soon wished to be back in my own world. It was harder to deal with, but more rewarding, too. The next thing I knew, I was back, as if nothing had happened.

It occurred to me that I had been a fool. I had started my life in this world with an eye towards safety, ease, and mindless labor. I had arrived, ignorant, with no vision. I would remember this place, but I wanted to start anew. With experience and wisdom, I desired a fresh start. It wasn't enough to simply mine in safety.

I needed to be smarter about everything I was doing. The mining I had done had kept me relatively safe, but had been horribly inefficient. Caving, though more dangerous, and easier to get lost in, was also more efficient by far. I had wasted days digging out layers near the surface, when I could have been mining redstone and diamonds in the depths. I had built my portal in the heart of my base, instead of in a safely cordoned off area. I had mined stacks of redstone, and done nothing with it. I had acted in confusion and ignorance.

I had taken advantage of my wiki, my GPS, my window to other worlds. I now knew that I could do so much more. It was time to gain vision, and do great things! I closed my eyes, wishing for a new world, a world that I could make my own, a world that I would not fear.


	4. A Brave, New World

I opened my eyes to a new world. A wet world. A sandy world. I was on the beach, staring at an ocean. Turning around, I saw snow-covered trees, a taiga. This had potential. The first thing I did was note my position: x=-188, y=66, z=213 (-188, 66, 213). You would think I would start at 0, 60, 0, but whatever. I started off quickly by harvesting a spruce tree and replanting it. That gave me a crafting table, shovel, sword, pickaxe, and axe.

Then I decided to explore a little. Following the beach to my left, I quickly ran into a swamp. The only thought on my mind was, "Good, I'll be able to make sticky pistons." Exploring in the other direction from where I'd started, I found sheep and extreme hills. I quickly harvested some coal, and found night setting on me.

I spent the night in the ocean, swimming at a distance from the shoreline. This was my first, great mistake. It's amazing how much swimming takes it out of you. I was starving quite quickly. I made it to shore and quickly made a boat, but took some skeleton arrows for my trouble. I then set sail across the ocean.

Though I didn't feel sleepy, I found the strangest thing happened at one point. I could see something that looked like a lit up city on the ocean floor. As I got closer, it became clear I was looking at lava pools that were somehow sheltered from the water. It was a gorgeous sight, and then they suddenly winked out of sight, obscured by the ocean floor itself. It was a strange sight.

As dawn approached, I came to shore again on the other side of the ocean. The herd of cattle in the forest gave me fresh meat, and the extreme hills gave me the cobblestone for a furnace to cook it. Two steaks later, and I felt much better.

I had a good potential base here, at 220,75,283. It had a large, hollowed out extreme hill that appeared to have some potential caverns that seemed promising. I decided my first task, however, would be to map out the boundaries of the ocean. With a simple boat, I could potentially have access to a dozen or more biomes, and all the varied resources they offered. If I could somehow turn the whole surrounding area into one massive base, I might be in business.

With plenty of steaks and a boat, I set off to explore the boundaries of the ocean. I quickly skirted around the extreme hills, which had a lot of potential, and came to another forest. As night began to set again, I came across the swamp I'd seen before, and circled around to the taiga I'd started at. After that was the HUGE extreme hills, followed by a swamp and some plains at -917, 71, 698.

I paused at the plains for a bit to observe a strange effect I'd been noticing for a while. I would see open ocean before me, and suddenly chunks of terrain would appear out of nothing before me. It was extremely bizarre.

After appreciating the effect for a bit, I got back in my boat. The next biome was a taiga with some wolves at -742, 62, 876. I made a mental note to get some bones for them later. After that was more extreme hills, with some nice looking caverns around -460, 62, 1198.

I soon came to a large desert, as night was setting, and then a taiga. It was at this point that I made a tactical mistake and ran aground. I ended up having to fight a spider, followed by two zombies, just to stay alive. Once again, I was treading water at midnight.

As morning came, I rebuilt my boat. It was odd, I'd made the boat out of spruce planks, yet the wreckage was oak. I continued my boating expedition. The taiga gave way to desert again, and it was then that I saw something new, worthy of exploration. There was a large building ahead of me near the short, red brick of some sort and sandstone. Pulling up my wiki revealed that I had found a Desert Temple, in sight of 249, 62, 1109.

Eventually, the massive desert gave way to taiga and forest. I knew where my sand mines would be. The forest had more wolves near 858, 62, 1199. I contemplated the scale of what I was thinking for a moment. As near as I could tell from my notes, this ocean was approximately 1000 block by 1000 blocks in size. I was only exploring the coastline. At some point, I was thinking about sending materials along this expanse and somehow managing all these vast resources. I had seen dozens of underground caverns before they winked out, clearly going down to the lava layer.

How was I going to connect all this? By hopping into my little boat? Seriously? How many rails would it take to connect everything together? How much redstone would it take to power them? I had recently been in a world where I cowered in a snow hill, afraid to venture forth, and now was I really going to contemplate making this OCEAN my base? Had I lost my mind?

As I contemplated that, I realized there was a small island nearby. 949, 62, 1209 contained enough land for a small house. There were a few sheep, a few trees, and, most importantly, it was isolated. It might be the perfect place to set up shop. I would finish exploring the boundaries of this land, but perhaps I had found a place I could call home.

Another massive desert greeted me, followed by a small forest and plains. It was then that I saw a giant tree in the distance. More sprang into view, and I knew I had finally found a jungle near 1383, 62, 1636. Now, the only thing I hadn't found was a Mushroom Island. I expected I would be criss-crossing the ocean enough to find one, if it existed.

While passing the plains after that, I saw some endermen and decided to have some fun. I stared at them. I could hear their cries of rage from my boat, as the three stood on the shore glaring at me. I moved on past a forest, but the didn't follow me. It was as I sat gazing at the sunrise, nearly three thousand blocks away from where I had started, that I paused. I had seen everything, now, except a Mushroom Island and Ice Plains. I had already travelled 2000 blocks in one direction, and my wiki warned me that there could easily be an additional 23000 blocks of distance.

I decided to turn back. I had found meat, sand, wood, and stone. I knew of at least one island that could be my home. I had access to enough resources to satisfy my needs, and had a boat I could shelter in at night. I noted my position, 1709, 62, 1221, and turned around. It was time to go home. I would look for any Mushroom Islands on the way, and determine my strategy for this place.

Getting home proved... tricky. It seemed I had gotten caught in a cove, and my efforts to escape kept leading me to land. I even crashed my boat on some lily pads, of all things. After a bit of work, I was able to escape, but still ran into other obstacles. It was clear that my mental image of a giant empty ocean was far from correct. It was irregularly shaped, and had various items scattered through it.

I started getting turned around again, when I found a convenient bit of island at 936, 62, 1096. It was an oblong bit of sand and dirt, with a dirt overhang over the ocean. Very strange bit of geography next to a swamp.

It wasn't long after that, keeping land on my left instead of right, that I began to recognize familiar terrain. It was becoming quite clear to me that I had traveled in anything but a straight line on my way out. My efforts to go in a straight line towards my destination kept failing as bits of land jutted into my path. A bit later I passed the floating leaves of a tree I had harvested earlier.

Being underground for months on end, dealing with the simple issues of falling water and lava, I had been sheltered from the queer realities of this place. Stuff just suspends itself in midair until you knock it down. Even water doesn't fall properly, but rather just flows forth in an endless stream. Rocks wouldn't fall at all, however. It was madness, and could mess with your head if you thought on it too much.

As I crashed my little boat for the fourth or fifth time, I realized the folly of what I had done. While I had explored great distances, and found many things, I had also, in sheer folly, ended up farther and farther from my home, completely lost.

At 2782, 64, 1778, nearly 4000 blocks away from where I'd started, I closed my eyes, wishing I could just start all this over again.


	5. A Brave, New World, Redux

I opened my eyes to a very familiar world. Again, I was on the beach, staring at the ocean. I chopped down the tree behind me and replanted it, then went to where I had found my first pieces of coal last time. They were back. The world was restored.

This time, I quickly made a boat and went across the inlet. It was night by the time the cows came into view. I waited patiently. I had learned from my last foray here that boating let me travel without getting hungry. I could wait.

With the morning light, I killed four cows and went to another major coal vein. With food and coal taken care of, I boated back to my first extreme hill. I went looking for caverns. I found one high in the hill that went through the top. It quickly became a small base with a crafting table and furnace. Looking out the other entrance, I saw another cavern right below, so I dug down to that, and started exploring. I didn't get far, because there was a deep chasm going down to who knows where.

I decided to create a water elevator to go exploring. I had found some iron, so I made a bucket and scooped some water from the ocean. Using that, I was able to place the water at the top of the drop and ride the water down.

Stop and think about this for a moment. I placed water on a cliff, and it just sat there, gushing downward, letting me go up and down into the chamber as I saw fit. It was bizarre, but effective. I accepted it as part of this world's strange physics.

After a short mining expedition, I had more coal and about twenty five bars of iron. On the down side, I was getting low on food, and didn't have a lot of dirt or stone, aside from the mountain I was attempting to survive in. I decided to get to my boat and try my luck across the pond.

I was able to make it across, and get some minor mining done, then worked my way around to where I could see a floating island in the sky. I decided to turn it into a small, secure base. With that in mind, I built a dirt bridge to it, then hollowed it down to the stone. Using a forge, I converted a bunch of cobblestone into stone, then fleshed it out. I set up a waterfall as access to the base, then exited and destroyed the dirt bridge to finish the security.

After that, I decided to light up the giant hole inside the extreme hill just outside that floating base. Everything was going so well, until I fell into one of the caves and found myself surrounded by two creepers and no way to directly strike at them. In a fantastic explosion, I died. Again. Across the ocean from where I knew I would awaken.

My next fantastic death was due to starvation, followed by a creeper explosion. Starving, no health left, waiting for my wheat farm to mature, and a creeper snuck into my base. Sigh. Getting resources was starting to get annoying.

I decided to try my luck at the other base, next. It had large caverns, a very secure base, and lots of potential. My first task was to knock out the walls and replace them with glass. While I was at it, I set up an outdoor wheat farm with a water trench on the east side, and a platform for trees on the west side. With that, I would be able to harvest wood and wheat without leaving my base, so that starvation incident wouldn't be an issue in the future.

I got some decent mining done, then returned to the first base. I put some glass in to protect against creeper attack, and decided to go for some more mining. My biggest issue with this base was the lack of a deep mine to harvest. I went to the back of the little cavern system, and started digging a spiral staircase down. My goal was simple: I would create a waterfall that I could ride down, and then spiral staircase my way back up.

My first attempt at the waterfall was a disaster. The water spilled everywhere and knocked out all the torches. Worse, while retrieving the torches I found myself surrounded by two skeletons and a creeper. I managed to kill the creeper and one skeleton, and retreated. It was time to get signs to contain the water in it's channel. Fortunately, I had a forest nearby that I could harvest.

A few signs later, and I was able to start deep mining. Skirting around the lava pool for the time being, I was able to collect a wonderful harvest. I got some lapis, gold, iron, and emeralds. Oh, and around ninety pieces of redstone. A made some iron and gold armor and considered my options. Suddenly, I had the ability to start doing some cool stuff.

Well, I almost had the ability to do some cool stuff. I had walled off one entrance with glass, but I still had another entrance that I wanted to be able to close off. However, to do it properly, I really needed sticky pistons, and for that I would need to go to the swamp and kills some slimes.

I arrived in the swamp at night and harvested a few trees in the water. With sunrise, I moved inland, looking for slimes. I killed some creepers and a spider, but didn't see any slimes. I fell into the top of a chasm by accident, and had to sacrifice a lot of my wood to get out. Soon after that, I found a nice chamber loaded with coal and iron. Exploring it, I found a drop that led down to a lava waterfall.

I quickly found myself distracted by mining, when I suddenly heard a slurping, thumping noise. Moving to the entrance, I saw night had fallen. My slimes had arrived. I just needed to wait for day to finish them off in relative safety. I mined to occupy my time, and a bit later acquired nine slimeballs for my trouble. With that done, I planted a bunch of torches around the entrance to the mine, and returned to my main base. It was time to build a 2x3 door for my base.

I knew I wanted to use XOR gates with switches to control my doors, or use some sort of latch circuit to use buttons to toggle the doors open/closed. I closed my eyes. I needed to go back to my god world and design this. I could build it after I knew what I needed.

I learned more in my god world as I worked. With some effort, I found I could dispell all the creatures that were getting in the way of my work. More interesting, I could even force time to be when I wanted. It took a while, but I made it work. My first idea had been to use an RS NOR latch with some feedback loops triggered by buttons. I quickly got frustrated with my lack of progress and switched to a piston-based T Flip-Flop. I hid the flip-flop directly under the door, and wired two buttons to the flip-flip on either side of the door.

I carefully examined the results, making some mental notes of the key points, then returned to my base. I carefully built six sticky pistons, two regular pistons, four redstone torches, and a repeater. I soon realized I had forgotten the two buttons. I also smelted a large amount of stone from the cobblestone to mask where the wiring was hidden.

After a day's worth of work, I had a functioning door. The only concern was whether I would do better to use a stone door or a glass door. With that, I contemplated my next action. I decided to go mining, which was remarkably easy. Too easy. I didn't run into any creatures. In fact, no creatures had bothered me while working on the door, either. It was then that I realized my desire to be rid of annoyances had carried over into this world. I had more power than I'd realized. I restored the ability of creatures to appear, and resumed mining.

When I had plenty of resources collected, I moved back to my base, and found I had a new problem: I had a lot of materials that needed smelting, and only one furnace. Mind you, I didn't really think that the furnace capacity was an issue, just that it would need a lot of monitoring. I set up an automatic smelting station to fix that problem. Using three hoppers, I used a small chest to feed smeltable ores into the furnace, another to feed coal into the furnace, and a large chest to collect the results. Then I went out to get some more wheat for bread.

Have I mentioned that creepers really annoy me? I stepped outside and started climbing up to my small wheat farm. As I moved, I heard a creeper drop behind me... and explode next to the button for my door, locking me out of my own base. Have I mentioned that I hate creepers? I had to jury-rig the button to get back into my base, get supplies, and repair the door mechanism.

With that done, I was able to harvest and expand my wheat field, and harvest a bunch of sugar cane as well. When you have a ton of sugar cane, two options come to mind: making cakes, and making books. Perhaps it was finally time to make an enchanting table.

I considered it, but I didn't have enough diamonds to have anything worth enchanting. Oh well, perhaps I would find more on my next trip down. With a little work, and some time trying to find the exit back up, I soon had enough diamonds to start working on getting an enchanted pickaxe.

The next issue was pretty simple: I needed an enchanting room with plenty of bookshelves in it. For that, I needed a ton of leather and sugar cane. The sugar cane was no problem. With all the beaches around, I had found plenty of it and started a small farm at the beach next to me. I also needed leather, and that was going to be trickier. There were a ton of cattle at my secondary base, but they were scattered all over the place.

I set across the ocean to my secondary base. I spent the night harvesting wood from my tree farm, and the day feeding cattle hay to breed them. After a round of that, I returned to my main base and harvested sugar cane That set got me a few bookshelves, but I needed more. I wanted a full set of fifteen bookshelves.

After I had about half the bookshelves, I decided it was time to make a proper cattle pen. That, of course, meant spending more time at my outpost, as I'd come to think of my secondary base in the sky. Harvesting from my tree farm gave me plenty of wood for fences and gates. Luring four cows and two chickens to the area after I'd cleared enough dirt away to make a large pen was somewhat trickier.

Once I had the pen set up, I proceeded to slaughter as many other cows as I could find, gathering plenty of leather to finish making my books. My next issue was getting obsidian for the enchanting table. I went down into my mine, and realized I had forgotten to make a diamond pickaxe. A short time later I was back, grabbing enough obsidian for both my enchanting table and a nether portal.

I build a sticky piston 1x2 door for the enchanting room attached to a switch. Then I enchanted my diamond pickaxe at level 30 and was rewarded with Unbreaking III AND Silk Touch. I would be doing this again.

I started building a similar chamber for the nether portal before lighting it, and found I'd run out of slime balls. It was time to go back to the swamp. A short time later, I was back with the two slimeballs I needed for sticky pistons. After fighting a little bit with repeaters, I had buttons connected to the door to the nether portal chamber. With trepidation, I lit it once again.

I chickened out for a bit, doing a little more mining, making some bread, that sort of thing. Eventually, I screwed up my courage. It was time to go back to hell.


	6. Hellish Shortcuts

I stepped through the portal with a chunk of cobblestone in hand, ready for the worst. I appeared in a relatively boring looking, secluded spot. There were a couple openings to larger areas, so I quickly walled them up, leaving only a small doorway facing a wall of netherrack. There were some glowstone blocks above my bunker that I quickly harvested, along with some blocks of nether quartz ore.

Exploring, I was surprised to see gravel strewn across the landscape. This was something I hadn't seen before, and it seemed odd to see something so mundane in such a hellish landscape. I also found a large bed of soul sand that I was able to mine out a bit.

While exploring, I only saw one ghast, which I retreated from, and the usual hoards of zombie pigmen. After a bit, I returned to my base and found I had three zombie pigmen in the tiny room with me. Only one slipped out with me, and I killed it with a diamond sword in no time.

Unlike my previous excursion, I became acutely aware of one major lacking: cobblestone. Because I had done no strip mining, I had very little cobblestone to my name. I would have to approach the nether very differently this time, or find a wholly new approach to getting mass quantities of cobblestone for my nether projects.

For whatever reason, I decided to do a little local mapping on the overworld. Spending the night doing that, I soon realized why I had had so many issues with the ocean before: it was far from the large blob I had imagined. Instead, it was more like a giant, meandering river that wove its way through the terrain.

At one point, I found a small bit of land that I could use to hunt squid. I got three inksacs for my trouble, and decided it was a good time to make a quill for one of my leftover books. I could use that to take better notes of locations for easy reference. Based on that desire, I quickly went back to my outpost and raised more chickens and cows. At nights, I harvested wood. Eventually I killed a chicken for its feathers, and returned home.

The trip home, and the hazards of running into squid in the middle of the ocean made me think about using the nether for a shortcut. I could take notes on locations, so it seemed like a good idea. I quickly returned to my mine and got more obsidian. The only real question, now, was where to put the portal. Probably the best option would be in the extreme hill next to my base. I could build the same button assembly I had created before and be in good shape.

I carefully built my new portal, encased it, set up buttons to open access to it, and then stepped through... and landed at my old nether-side portal. Going through that, I was back in my main base. I pounded my head on the wall for a few minutes, then tried to figure out what was going on.

After digging around on the wiki for a while, I finally discovered that I would have to manually create a second portal in the nether, carefully placed to link back to my second portal. There was no helping what had to be done. Back into the mine for more obsidian.

A short time later, I had my ten blocks and found myself facing a wall of netherrack. That was the direction I had to go. Pickaxe in hand, I sliced my way forward. After a fairly short distance, I stopped, took a sharp left, and plowed on ahead. After a brief pause for another pickaxe, I was at my destination, and assembled the portal. SUCCESS! I had my shortcut, and it was all buried in netherrack!

Of course, the third location I had a fondness for was the swamps. It seemed obvious that I should set up another nether portal there. It seemed likely that my best approach would be to figure out where I wanted the portal to be in the overworld, and then find the corresponding location in the nether to build it. I picked an ideal location a short distance underground and moved to the corresponding location in the nether.

Unfortunately, that corresponding location was located on an exposed ledge. A large amount of cobblestone and a large number of stairs resolved the issue, and gave me a nice, enclosed walkway to the swamp via the nether. Alas, the portal appeared on the surface instead of underground. It was time to start building my swamp base.

I enclosed the portal in cobblestone and dug an underground channel from there to the spot I'd meant it to appear. Next, I started working on building a sticky piston-powered door with two buttons on either side. For some stupid reason, I didn't bring sticky pistons with me. Being in the swamp, I didn't expect to have any problems with that, but the slimes were being bashful. I ended up wandering about a bit in the nearby desert, and found a village!

I have never, in all my life, met a more surly, insufferable, pack of jerks. They sat there, arms crossed, refusing to say anything to me except what trades they were willing to make that involved emeralds. They wouldn't negotiate, and each villager seemed to have an interest in only one product. Worse, it was almost nightfall. I ended up stuck in a tiny building with five of the jerks.

With the dawn, I was able to examine their crops. There was a lot of wheat, potatoes, and carrots, which nobody seemed to mind me harvesting. I replanted their crops for them, though nobody thanked me. The most bizarre thing was one villager was willing to give me an emerald for the twenty-one wheat he could have harvested himself. Fortunately, another one of the nuts was willing to give me seven watermelons for the emerald.

After the trades, I found myself wishing I had found some pumpkins, but it looked like I was well on my way to having a farm for everything I could grow, and I would finally be able to start breeding pigs. Shortly after that, I finished installing sticky pistons in my swamp base.

With all my new found vegetables, it seemed logical to rethink my approach to farming. I had a wheat farm above my main base and next to my outpost. The outpost farm worked well for supporting my cows and chickens, but the farm at my main base was just horribly inconvenient to access. With a nearly shear cliff to climb, and the tendency for creepers to hang out there, it just wasn't that practical. I decided to build a new garden in my main base.

The ideal location was actually an offshoot of the passage I took to get to my mine. With very little work, I had soil laid down, watered, and four of the five crops I wanted to grow planted. I even put little signs up to mark where various crops went. The only thing I was missing was pumpkins.

I also had a leftover carrot. I had seen some pigs in the swamp, and decided to start breeding them over there. I took my carrot and a ton of fencing, and was able to lure three pigs into it before night fell. All in all, I was quite pleased with myself.

My only problem was storage space. It seemed I was running out of space for my chests to store stuff. I wanted to expand on my automatic furnace, and create an automatic sorting and storage system. The only problem was, I didn't have anywhere close to enough iron for all the hoppers I would need. I would have to start mining in earnest.

I had done strip mining before, many worlds ago, but never been smart about it. This time, I was going to mine in the depths. I needed more diamonds, iron, and experience. I had a diamond sword I wanted to get enchanted, and wanted to upgrade my armor to diamond as well. It was clearly time to get to work.

With that said, I had also heard rumors that villagers build iron golems. It takes a lot of them to do it, though. I decided to go back to the village and add some expansions. I created a long, winding, wooden building with a bunch of doors granting access. Soon, I was rewarded with the love-making of rude, big-nosed, ugly people. I couldn't even tell which one was the woman.

Ah, the miracle of birth, and ugly children running underfoot. The only good thing was they did build some golems. To be honest, though, I didn't see the value of trying to trap them and kill them, given how much time I'd have to spend dealing with the ugly crew. I retreated and returned to my main base.

With that disappointing result, I returned to my mine. I picked a corner above a lava pit, and started digging. By digging in a straight line, I was able to find many diamonds, redstone, iron, and coal. After my second patch of diamonds, I broke through a wall and got flooded. It was minor, but I'd found a large chasm with waterfalls turning most of the lava into obsidian.

I was able to slowly light up the lowest level and finish converting the lava to obsidian. Above me, skeletons rained arrows down on me. I had to slowly take them out as I lit the place up. Once that was done, I slowly harvested the lapis, coal, iron, diamonds, and emeralds from the chasm, lighting up the upper levels of the chasm as I went.

Returning to my base, I had a new problem. My chests were full, I had lost my helmet, and the rest of my armor was almost trashed. I didn't have the diamonds for a new set of armor, so I made a new set of iron armor. I made the decision to start building a storage room.

The first step was to close my eyes and concentrate. Soon I was in my god world. There, I sat and fiddled with things for a little bit. I knew there was a way, with comparators, to create a sorting system. I had spent time examining such things, and had seen videos of the devices. There was a chap named dataless who had built a massive one, but it was a kid named ACtennis who gave me the instructions for the design I needed, which I modified to use dataless' multi chest system.

This was the first blow to my ego. I would need a minimum of three hoppers per chest, plus four additional hoppers to seed the system. I would also need gobs of redstone. I decided I could avoid the dropper elevator by feeding items in from my furnace output. That would let me pre-smelt items and autosort them.

With only sixty-five iron, however, that meant I would only be able to craft thirteen hoppers, or three chests of input. Tops. That just wasn't going to do the job. It would, however, be enough for me to get the prototype up and running. I used two chests and two hoppers to drop materials down from my furnace output to where I wanted to build the mass storage below. Then I started placing hoppers and getting things set up.

A while later, it appeared that everything was correct except for one thing: I had used up all my iron, and had nothing to make trapped chests with. The system also seemed to be a little bit glitchy. It didn't matter. I needed more iron, and I knew where I could find some. There was a second, large hill, and a third one, a short distance from my base. I could strip mine the two of them for iron until I got low on redstone, then switch to deep mining again. The days to come would be boring, but necessary if I wanted to have a storage room I could be proud of.


	7. Automatic Storage!

I dove into my mine and continued the linear mining that had proven so fruitful before. This time, I got a lot of redstone, but only six blocks of the iron I so desperately needed. It was enough to make tripwire hooks so I could create the trapped chests I wanted, but little else. I laid down a double chest and double trapped chest, then went ahead and set up the basic framework for four additional double chests. The redstone was all in place, but I didn't have hoppers.

I got a nasty surprise. The single chest I had placed to collect surplus items was now registering in my comparators, and causing the whole system to malfunction. I carefully removed key bits of redstone that could be replaced at my leisure, later. Next, I made item frames to mark the two active items I had: stone and redstone. I partially filled two more chests with cobblestone and gravel, as I was generating a lot of those. Wood would probably be the next item, though I didn't really need to harvest any for a while.

Next, I decided to try the upper levels of a nearby hill. I drilled holes through the upper levels of it, and got a handful of coal. The one thing that kept floating through my mind was: could I get an iron golem farm going? The basic principle was pretty simple: get the villagers to build the golems in a central place where I could funnel them away and slaughter them for iron. The trick, of course, would be to get the villagers together in one place where they would be under control.

I had a ton of cobblestone. If I could go to the village and coax them to go where I wanted them, then I should be able to make it all work. If I could build an elevated platform and coax the villagers onto it, maybe by making it the only place with doors, then I should be able to protect them and coax the golem creation into a place where I could use water to funnel them away. It was that, or spend fruitless hours mining for a few scraps of iron. It couldn't hurt to try.

I went to the village and attempted to start tearing down the doors to get a more effective layout in the town. I discovered something quite disturbing, though: I couldn't. Those ugly villagers were rebuilding them as fast as I could tear them down. It was truly amazing how productive these guys were, given that they couldn't be bothered to expand their own village. Despite that, they hadn't rebuilt after creeper explosions. It gave me an idea for future possibilities, but I just didn't have the gunpowder to try TNTing the village to the state I wanted it in.

I wandered back to my swamp outpost, and stumbled across a pit I'd marked with torches on an earlier visit. I decided to go ahead and explore it, since I had nothing better to do. To be honest, I was feeling kind of depressed about the whole iron golem flop, and was hoping a few easy diamonds would make up for it.

I hit the mother load of iron! The place was just crawling with iron ore, redstone ore, and coal. Over sixty-four iron later, I was very, very flush. I would be able to expand my my automatic sorter a lot. I quickly hurried back to my base to see the results of my find.

I had only two chests working, three more chests in position and wired up. I quickly made hoppers and connected those up to the system. Next I dug out space for more, and began expanding. When I got done, I had nine double chests in position and working, and the wiring ready for one more when I got a pair of tripwire hooks. I was sorting stone, redstone, cobblestone, gravel, dirt, netherrack, lapis, wheat, and seeds. I even had a framed item over each chest, to make sure I didn't get lost.

Even better, the underground farm was also in full swing, which made me very happy. My base was nice and productive, and another run down my new swamp mine would probably let me finish off the automatic storage chamber. Even better, all the experience I'd gotten let me get a sharpness and fire enchantment on my diamond sword!

I decided to make two more runs into the new mine. I didn't finish exploring it, by a long shot, but I was able to expand my storage chamber even further. With nineteen chests filling, and a small overflow chest, I was finally satisfied with my automatic storage system. I had also found a skeleton spawner and a zombie spawner. The zombie spawner was close to the mine entrance. I was thinking about using that for an experience farm.

Something I really wanted to find was a creeper spawner. I was in the mood to collect gunpowder and blow the village up and start it over as an iron farm. I was also thinking about creating a mushroom farm, since I had plenty of mushrooms available, and it might be nice to have some mushroom soup for a change.

I was also considering creating a tree farm with jungle wood. I knew it was around someplace, it would just be a matter of finding it. For the first time since I had woken up three worlds ago, I was feeling pretty good about my life.


	8. Chicken Charnel Houses

Something kept nagging at me as I considered my next move. I had reason to believe that my current setup was using far more redstone that was necessary. I closed my eyes and moved back to my god world. I had spent quite a bit of time dealing with the touchiness of this system, and thought I understood what the issues were, now. I set up a close version of the small design, that used one comparator, one torch, one repeater, and two dust per chest, and carefully loaded the "item" hoppers. Sure enough, 22 items fit in before getting sucked down again. I would be able to vastly shrink the size of my storage room, reclaiming many components for easy expansion in the future. Hoppers, as usual, would be the scarcity.

I closed my eyes and returned to my world. I would fix my base, first. After about a day's worth of work, I had reduced the volume of my storage sorting room by about two-thirds. I had the redstone resources needed to approximately double the capacity, too. The only thing missing was iron for hoppers... as usual.

I decided to make my next journey a quest for jungle wood. I wanted to get a massive tree farm going, and I thought the best way to accomplish that would be jungle wood. I hopped into my boat and started traveling along the coastline, just as I had the first time I was in this world. Despite those painful memories of being lost and confused, I felt no fear this time. There were two reasons for that. First, I had armor and good weapons. That meant I could easily travel across land if needed. Second, I had a compass.

It took quite a while to find a jungle. I found pumpkins, birch wood, and the desert temple again as I traveled. Two days later, I finally found what I was looking for. I harvested a jungle tree until I got some saplings. Then I set out, compass in hand, and made a beeline for home. I didn't care if I crossed land or ocean, I wasn't to be distracted. I found wolves and another jungle as I headed home and made note of their locations in my journal. I also made a note that there was another village next to the desert temple. I would be building a lot of portals in the nether, very soon.

Eventually, I came to my swamp outpost. From there, it was a short nether-trip to my main base. I quickly planted pumpkins in my garden, and then sat down to think about where I wanted the jungle and birch trees. I actually wanted the jungle trees outside my main base. It was large, with not a lot going on, anyway. It just seemed like the ideal place. Birch, on the other hand, would be an ideal addition to my first outpost, and would give me something to do while waiting for my cows and chickens to grow up. Things were coming along nicely.

I quickly set up the starting of a birch farm at my first outpost, and harvested some wheat and seed while biding my time. It occurred to me to make an automated egg farm while I waited. On a few runs to feed chickens and cows, I collected all the eggs I could, and took them back to my main base with me, along with the spoils of some mining there. Soon, I had a glassed in hopper with three chickens sitting on it and a chest beneath.

I went ahead and maybe a trapped snow golem as well, so I could collect snowballs. Somewhere in there, I had created a red and brown mushroom farm, too. Life was going well. I sat and worked on growing my egg farm for a bit. I figured it would be no big deal, but then I encountered a problem. The chicks, when the grew up, were dying instantly. Instead of getting an egg farm, I had a feather/chicken farm. While not all bad, it wasn't quite what I'd had in mind.

I decided a larger system of hoppers with water over them would work. I had also made the mistake of creating a hole in my mushroom farm, which I didn't really care for. It was time to get the resources for more hoppers, and try again.

I went to the swamp mine, since it seemed to have the most iron in it, and soon returned with a pile of iron. I was determined to get the chicken/egg farm working. This time, across from my veggie/mushroom farm.

My first attempt was a miserable failure. I created a three by three array of hoppers feeding into a chest. I then covered them with water, encased the whole thing with glass, and rigged a sticky piston to one of the glass panels to give me access to throw in eggs. I lobbed all the eggs I had into the thing, which gave me around six chicks. I then began dismantling my old system and killing off the chickens inside.

When I turned back to my new system, the chicks had all drowned. I went in, removed all the water, went to my free-range chicken farm at my outpost, got more eggs, came back, and tried again. Building up a chicken farm from just two chickens is hard. I got bored of staring at the chickens, waiting for them to lay an egg or two, so I decided to do some parallel mining down near the lava layer.

It wasn't exciting work, but it provided a good supply of diamonds, iron, redstone, and experience. With the diamonds and experience, I was able to get a pair of enchanted boots: Projectile Protection IV and Feather Fall IV! Suddenly, my options for exiting my sky outpost or outrunning creepers on cliffs had changed radically. I had already falling twice, leaving me barely alive. Now, I didn't need to fear that. The reduced damage would also help me deal with that skeleton spawner I hadn't dealt with yet.

Looking at my redstone levels, it occurred to me that I had enough to start thinking about some impressive projects, like the Iron Trench, as designed by Tango Tek. Alas, I still didn't have the base iron for it. However, it seemed likely that I could get about half of it built, and use the iron that generated to build up the other half. I would continue with my mining for the time being, but soon, I would tackle the issue of iron farming.

Additionally, I had heard the sound of slimes in the depths. If I could track those down, I could build a slime farm for experience and sticky pistons. Perhaps my best, first massive farm, however, should be a basic mob farm. Simply stated, I was in need of arrows, gunpowder, and experience for enchanting. A mob farm could address all those concerns quickly and easily. My second farm should probably be an automated tree farm. With bonemeal from the mob farm, that would suddenly become a viable option. I was beginning to see the ability to do big, big things.


	9. Mob Farm

I decided that my first task was to determine whether there were any other villages near my main base. If I wanted to create an Iron Trench, I was going to need a LOT of them handy. Now don't get me wrong, I think they're ugly as sin, and the thought of them having sex with each other is positively revolting. With that said, they are useful people. They could manufacture a ton of iron for me.

I went due west from my base at dawn for quite a distance, and found things that shocked me. Close to my base were pumpkins, cows, pigs, and even a jungle that I arrived at around noon. Even more impressive, the extreme hills I was in were MASSIVE! I had far more mining potential than I had ever realized.

The one thing I didn't find, even as I headed back from the jungle, was a village. I had no idea how I would ever get a few villagers where I needed them. Given that situation, I decided that I would make a mob farm as my next project. I started off the project by building out into the ocean around thirty blocks. There I built a small platform with a double chest and a crafting table.

My next step was to build up twenty-two blocks of cobblestone. That should just barely let dropping mobs live. The ladder on that pillar gave me access up and down. I built four six-by-six pads, with water leading to the center, and lined the pads with signs. I then covered over the whole thing so the pads were completely sealed with a ceiling that left a two block space.

I enclosed the drop, with a hopper chain at the bottom leading into the chest. After a little experimenting, it was clearly a success, but needed to water path leading forward from the drop. With a brief change, I had that set up. Now I just needed to add more layers to turn this into a giant system. An external ladder quickly gave me the access I needed.

With a little bit more work, I was almost out of cobblestone, and had a second level in my mob farm. I sat at the kill zone for a bit after that and enjoyed killing zombies and creepers as they came to me. They were so incredibly passive as I beat them up, collecting arrows, bones, rotten flesh, and gunpowder. As evening set before I would go to mine more cobblestone, rain suddenly moved in. I was shocked, as lightning struck a mere three ocean blocks away from me! I would never take storms for granted again.

I decided to go ahead and do some more branch mining near lava. I did two runs, and got a lot of cobblestone for the next layer, when I suddenly realized the lava I was dodging around was exactly what I needed to generate the cobblestone _AT_ the mob farm. I was being so, incredibly stupid! I built up the next level and then tried to generate cobblestone. Of course, I tried to be clever about it and generate a lot. The result was a bunch of cobblestone and a block of obsidian.

I would have to be far more clever, next time. I would also have to get more wood. I was running out with all the signs I was having to place. I would make a lava run and a wood run as my next actions. With a single day's worth of wood, I had enough signs to finish my project.

I found that building up a barrier wall and then filling a layer with water, then adding lava on that, was a very effective way to build a layer of stone where I wanted it. By chasing the lava spillover with water, I could get extra cobblestone for the next layer's barrier wall. There was a bit of trial and error involved, of course. I had a large water/lava spill at one point that resulted in a column of cobblestone going all the way from the farm down to the ocean. After cleaning that up, though, I had lots of cobblestone to work with.

In the end, I had a five-layer tall spawning area completely enclosed by cobblestone. I could, at my leisure, extend it higher at any time, too. I was pleased with the result. It wasn't the fastest thing, by far, but it was a nice start. I would try building a higher efficiency one later, when I had an iron farm going. The main advantage, now, was I had all the rotten flesh I could eat, and a health stock of arrows.

I considered the issues with it. First, it was spawning spiders, who couldn't escape to be killed. There was no telling how much they were clogging things up. At least they couldn't get into the waterways to cause major issues. Second, the pads were large enough that it could take a while for things to fall off them and into the channels. Third, the channels had gaps in order to keep water flowing towards the exit. It wasn't a big problem, but was another chance for things to get gummed up.

I could probably improve things dramatically with an array of sticky pistons on a clock dropping them slowly down a one block wide channel into a water stream. I just couldn't imagine having all the iron needed for those sticky pistons right now. I had plenty of wood and redstone, but iron was still my scarce resource. No matter how I looked at it, I needed to force those villagers to breed (ugh!) and then get an iron trench built.

I did some quick calculations, and realized I would have to move the villagers 340 blocks west and 650 blocks south to move them to my base. It was time to conduct some experiments in my god realm. If they worked, I had a plan.


	10. How to Breed Adam and Eve2

I found a nice spot in my base to store three villagers. I then began creating a straight, level path towards the swamp and village. I cut through hills in the forest, through taiga, through swampland (building ramps over water as needed), and finally came to the spot where I needed to turn right into the desert. Continuing, I built my path right up to the village. I had also built sidewalls on both sides.

With that done, I went back to my base for supplies: three minecarts, some powered rails, regular rails, and a couple switches. I built an apparatus to pile the three carts on top of each other, loaded a villager into the triple cart, and the carts split apart. I tried again, but the same thing happened. With a sigh, I decided on a different strategy. I would simply cover the path over, and then load three villagers into it and "escort" them along the path.

There was even a chance I could lure them along with a string of wooden doors inside. I went back to base and started brewing up cobblestone for my covered path. It wasn't long before I had a large chunk of path covered, and two events were coming on me. First, I was out of cobblestone. Second, I was out of daylight. I decided I'd spend the night manufacturing cobblestone with a little trick: I would put lava over to incoming water streams, and mine the resulting stone out from under it.

I buried myself underground to protect myself from mobs, and began working. I soon found that water sloshing out would push me back, making things less efficient, so I braced myself with a half slab of wood. Shortly after that, lava leaked out.

I resurrected at my old spot on the beach at night. All my diamond armor was gone. My diamond, flame aspect sword was gone. My silk touch pick was gone. My featherfall boots were gone. I had no choice but to race back to base and start over.

Okay, to be fair, I wasn't truly starting over. I already had a nice mine going, with lots of iron to be had. I did a bit of branch mining and quickly got myself some decent armor and tools. I even had a handful of diamonds again. I also had mountains of coal piled up for smelting, and vast numbers of other resources. In no time, I was building things up again. My chicken farm was even coming along so well that it was about time to convert the eggs I was collecting into an automatic chicken cooking farm.

My next strategy was to build a stone machine: using lava and water and a piston on a timer to build out the walls and ceiling on my paths. After building two thirteen stone lengths, I found the process was horribly inefficient. The setup took far too long, and the whole system was twitchy. My next attempt was a second round of a cobblestone generator, modeled after Sethbling's design, but only one deep since I had no spare hoppers. That was also rather twitchy and inefficient.

Finally, I decided on an old-fashioned, but effective approach. I did a couple rounds of branch mining, getting good resources and mounds of cobblestone, then would take the cobblestone out to build out the path. That was the plan, anyway. The reality was the end of my second branch burst onto a lava pool in a chasm. That was good news, until two creepers dropped and boomed in quick succession. Suddenly, I was in a race to simply recover all my stuff, again.

I recovered my loot, and did a round of covering the path. The result was I got the entire short leg from the village to the bend covered. It was time for more mining, possibly with a round of cavern exploration. I got lots of gold and iron and cobblestone out of the cavern, as well as finishing lighting it up. With those results, I was able to finish covering the pathway.

My next step was simple: make a ton of doors. My goal was simple: I would shove a few villagers into my pathway, and then I would use doors to lure them through the tunnel. I figured they would want to remain near the "center" of the doors. The biggest risk was that they would not view the doors as valid village doors.

The whole "doors" thing was a miserable failure. Worse, a zombie managed to get in there, and kill most of the villagers. Worse yet, the iron golems started attacking me when I knocked out doors. After a few false starts, I finally managed to corral three villagers into my channel, though only two of them could be moved along it. I had to use buckets of water to force them a significant distance away from the village. Finally, I could shove them along, slowly.

As we moved along, I found myself wondering which of them was the man, and which was the woman. They both had unibrows, though one wore white, and the other brown. They also appeared to be bald. After some discussion with them, it was revealed that the one in brown was the woman. When I explained that they would be starting a new society together, breeding like mad, the man seemed reluctant.

It seems that the villagers often found themselves in an amorous mood with no one willing to join them. Apparently, they had gotten their hands on some good porn, to satisfy themselves. The woman had a nice collection of Playgirl, and seemed reluctant to be part of this breeding program, too. I was starting to have serious concerns about the likelihood of this whole project working.

After days of shoving the ugly twins, and I hoped I wasn't about to promote incest as the basis for a new society, though that would explain a lot, I finally pushed them over the lip into their new pit, sealed them in, and went home.

A short time later, armed with a few doors and glass, I returned to my new Adam and Eve, only to find that Eve was missing. I went ahead and installed some doors and gave them access to light. During that time, I questioned Adam closely about what had happened to his blushing bride. He insisted he had no idea where she'd gone. Of course, I was rather incredulous about that idea. Regardless, I had him happy about having doors to run through, so I went to find another bride for him.

The ravages of zombies had taken a toll: there were only two villagers left. I managed to secure one in my tunnel, and began escorting her to her husband. She seemed hesitant about meeting her new groom. I assured her, often, that he was a very handsome man, a great humanitarian, and there were even rumors he was good in bed.

I don't like being a pushy person, but in the long run, it was the only way to get her moving. In the end, she saw wooden doors, and suddenly rushed to her groom. With a shattering of glass under her feet, she dropped down the Adam of questionable morals, and I sealed her in. I would check often, to make sure they were prospering. Soon, the village would be able to raise children.

The next day, Adam still had his bride, so I decided to go branch mining to expand my automatic storage system. I hoped I would have the pitter-patter of unibrowed feet when I got back.


	11. Villager Inbreeding and Chickens

I checked on Adam and Eve a couple times, in between a couple more branch mines and an extension of the storage room. They seemed to be locked in a tight embrace, but there was no sign of children. The chickens, on the other hand, had filled a double chest full of eggs, along with the nine hoppers feeding into it.

So, I found myself with two projects screaming to be done: get the village populated, and get an automated chicken cooker going. I had mountains of redstone and cobblestone, so I was in good shape, as long as I didn't need too many pistons. As usual, I was low on iron.

For my first step, I tore down the the chicken coop and slaughtered the chickens inside. Fifty-two chickens later, and the clucking had finally stopped. I kept the chest of eggs around for my next project. Next, I did some deforestation and reforestation in the spruce grove. I was low on wood, too.

Finally, I checked in on the newlyweds. Eve2 was still alive, but there was no sign of children. I decided the pit I had left them in might be too small, so I expanded it a bit. Nothing like having a little space to make ugly babies. Hopefully, I hadn't erred and tried to repopulate the village with Adam and Steve. I wasn't about to check.

I did a little branch mining, then relocated all the eggs into my storage room. I was able to reuse the hoppers to extend my sorting system a little, which was good. Next, I checked on Adam and Eve2 again. Still no kids. They did like playing with the four or five doors I'd given them, perhaps they just needed a few more to feel cozy.

I installed a bunch more doors, and added some torches. I couldn't imagine them wanting to make love in the light, what with their looks and all, but before I'd even finished, there was an ugly little troll... err, I mean, an adorable little unibrowed child, running about in their personal pit. Cain's parents obviously had no shame, doing it while I was right there.

My next task was to actually build a semi-automatic chicken cooker. I set up a bunch of chickens in an upper area that would lay eggs on hoppers that fed into a dispenser. The dispenser was hooked to a timer and a switch that would fire those eggs into a small chamber. The floor of the chamber could be removed by sticky piston, dropping chickens onto a pool of lava. Beneath that was another hopper that fed into a chest.

I set everything up, did some branch mining, and then dropped my adult chickens. The hopper was under a sign, and the whole thing failed. I would have to move the hopper up a little, or the lava down a little. I sighed and went to work moving down the lava.

Moving the lava down failed, too. Eventually, I went with a simple crusher design. Two presses of a button would crush the chickens and release them into the hopper. I had an automatic furnace, so cooking them wasn't really a big deal, anyway.

My next project was to return to my lovely, adorable, sexy, unibrowed villagers and encourage them to breed more. When I arrived, I had five of the lads and ladies waiting for me. I dug down further and moved the doors to the next level. One villager dropped down to join me, which saved me the trouble of shoving him down.

Apparently he was the popular guy, because two of the ladies tried to join him. Unfortunately, they had to die. I mourned for them, briefly, but was satisfied that I had two villagers remaining above. Soon, their was a runt with them, as I built them a lovely nine-by-nine chamber to live in, complete with skylight. I added some water in all four corners, so they could stay cool and show off their swimsuits. Fortunately, they chose to play in the water in their clothes, for which I was grateful.

With some more effort, I had two pipes leading up from the sides, and streaming back to the center above the breeding pool. From there, I started a water channel towards my base. I quickly realized I was going to have a problem. It was going to intersect with the expansion of my automatic sorting room.

I took some careful measurements, and then started expanding the sorting chamber. Sure enough, the villager water path collided with the bottom of a massive expansion of the sorting chamber. I decided that having it marked was adequate. Since I didn't know what I wanted to do with villagers who arrived there, I set up a lava pit for them.

My next project was to check up on how my breeding program was going. When I tried to check, however, I found that I couldn't see well. It looked like the breeding program was successful, but it was very hard to tell. I decided to channel my inner pervert. I began building a glass roof over the close half of the chamber. Sure enough, the breeding program was doing well, and now I could sit over the orgy, watching them creating little unibrowed midgets.

With that project going, I did some more branch mining for iron. As usual, I was getting low. As my inventory was almost completely full, I broke into what looked like a chasm. I rushed back to drop off my loot, then went back to get what I could easily find. As I started exploring, I found branches and lots of waterfalls throughout the cavern. As I moved higher, I found more and more branches. This was a cave system, not a simple cavern.

I found diamonds, iron, and mountains of coal before I was full up and lost. Digging up, I found a waterfall that lead up to the ocean floor. Swimming higher, I broke the surface a short distance from a swamp on the back side of my extreme hills.

I had another problem, though. I had collected too much cobblestone. Smelting it into stone helped, but I was still going to start choking my sorter, and THAT would break the whole thing. It was time to turn the system into one that deposits into three stacked double chests. I didn't get everything expanded, but I had enough that I wasn't going to be in panic mode.

Even better, however, was I broke into a cavern I had already explored. It would make the perfect basis for building a mercantile with the villagers. With the ugly perverts breeding like rabbits, it was about time I prepared to do something with them. Speaking of which, perhaps I should check on how their orgy was doing.


	12. A World With People

I was very disturbed to find that the orgy didn't exist. There was just around a dozen adult villagers bumping against each other, but there was no lovey-lovey. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. I looked at my wiki, checked measurements, moved the array of doors down, and nothing changed. I moved them back up. Nothing changed. All I accomplished was burning through iron for pickaxes and shovels.

A few rounds of branch mining recovered my iron supplies. I checked my wiki again, and decided I would have to move the doors back down, and hope for the best. If that failed, I would try shrinking the orgy pool to see if that would start funneling them out and away. "Ain't nothin' easy," as they say. I would never understand why doors made villagers horny. Some sort of wood fetish, I suppose.

It also occurred to me that I might want to set up a chest, so I could store doors and do a complete reset on the "village". I'd probably have to harvest a ton of trees, too. I'd been harvesting plenty of spruce, but I really needed to switch over to oak if I wanted mass production of high density wood.

As I was musing on this, a strange thing occurred. I became aware that there was another world where many people were in, and that it was possible to join them. At first, this didn't seem like all that big a deal, but the idea of joining such a place was intriguing. To join it, it was necessary to focus on four numbers separated by dots. Sort of a strange ritual, but what the heck. I concentrated, and soon enough I found myself in a grand structure. In each of the four cardinal directions were glass domes over pits, with bridges across them. Lava flowed down in two of them, water in the other two.

As I explored further, I found rules about no griefing, whatever that was, being polite, etc. It seemed like a friendly place. There was some sort of system where by simply being there, you could earn money. They were even nice enough to start me off with a stone pick, axe, sword, and shovel.

I soon headed off, killing a few cows and pigs, looking for a nice hill or mountain I could settle into. Feeling a little paranoid, I decided to seal myself into the mountain with stone. I quickly got a small base going, and started mining down. I had a small supply of wood, but really wanted coal and iron.

Throughout this, I could hear the telepathic chatter of the other people in the world. It was all quite pleasant. I dug down into the earth, soon hitting a cave system that I could explore. Upon returning, I found something rather odd happening. I felt the impression that one of the other people wanted to teleport to my location! This seemed rather odd, but I acquiesced and soon this stranger was standing next to me. He ran off down my mineshaft and was soon gone.

A little while later, while exploring a cavern, I was halfway up a pillar of gravel, bucket in hand next to a lava fall, when suddenly all my equipment, except for my armor, disappeared! I wasn't the only one, as someone named minerkate, don't ask me why she didn't capitalize her name, started complaining over the telepathic link that her stuff was gone. Apparently, there was someone in this world with god powers, who had simply removed all inventory. He was quite apologetic, and soon had us sorted back out.

A little while later, a bunch of people started chattering about a "drop party". We were told to teleport to Spawn, and join in. I couldn't figure out how to do that, so I teleported to one of the other people, instead. Sure enough, one person was flying around over our heads, tossing stuff down on us. Gold, diamonds, diamond blocks, armor, golden apples, emeralds, and other stuff.

It was kind of strange. After all the hard work to get a half-stack of iron, I found myself with enough diamond to equip myself for months to come. With the drop party over, I returned to my hole in the mountain, and sorted out my winnings. At the same time, I listened as they discussed issues of "facs", and I finally realized there was something called factions, which explained why some people were identified as "miners", and some as various other things.

What was disturbing was that the people who had god powers were able to find you, and kill you, no matter where you were. Some, alas, took great delight in that. Two of us sailed across a nearly empty ocean to find new land, and found ourselves being hunted down. To call it frustrating was an understatement. They would dispense powerful items, and then beat us up with them.

It was lonely in my own world, certainly, but I didn't have to deal with psycho stalkers, either. Being able to teleport home was nice, but not being able to escape others was less so. After some more time, what I discovered was that I had made some friends, but also found some people irritating. Also, I missed my base.

I returned to my own world, in my storage sorting system, and smiled. I worked alone to build this, and could certainly use help, but I didn't have to worry about crazy invisible people stalking me and harassing me. It was good to be home.

After some thought, I returned. I could contribute redstone devices to our faction's base, and make life easier. I truly wanted to help build projects with people. I created a chicken harvesting station for our food needs, created an oak tree farm, created a wheat farm, and found lots of redstone. Life was good.

Then my faction's leader invited another person to join us, and started showing him around the base. While I was working at a crafting table, I was suddenly stabbed in the back. Soon, I was dead. After traveling across a massive ocean to get away from those murderous fiends, my illustrious leader, in his infinite wisdom, invited a complete stranger to wander through our base unattended.

I left the faction, desiring to free myself of morons who don't get basic concepts, like don't sit in a pit with a chicken. I might continue to visit this world, but I was NOT going to saddle myself to morons ever again. I let him keep the chicken processor as a parting gift.


	13. Island Mining and Friends

My next step was simple: find a new, isolated land for my base. What I found was a small island in the middle of the ocean. By teleporting to spawn, I was able to collect some oak saplings to start generating wood on this barren land. By harvesting grass seeds, I soon had a small farm going by the ocean.

My former faction members were nice enough to provide me a gift of watermelon and diamonds, which I used to start acquiring tools and a watermelon farm. Things were going well as I started mining down to bedrock for some low-level branch mining, when the evil god arrived to harass me.

He didn't immediately do anything to me, so I thought he had chosen to leave me alone. I was wrong. He suddenly announced that he'd found diamonds. Diamonds! WOOHOO! Then he wanted me to wait while he did something down there. I should have been suspicious. He had wired a pressure plate to a dispenser loaded with arrows that turned me into a pincushion.

He disappeared from the world after that, and I was grateful he was gone. I would have to confront him about his antics. He could kill me over and over, taking my equipment, and I could do nothing about it. On the other hand, he showed no signs of wanting to truly destroy me. It made little sense, and I hoped I could talk sense into him.

As I explored, I found that one of my guests had broken into an abandoned mine shaft. I decided to start exploring it, and quickly found that it was massive. I decided that this would become the main expanse of my base. I was also discovering cave spider spawners, which I carefully neutralized with torches. I would make use of them later.

It was at this point that another person invited me to their faction. This time, however, the person was already established. I accepted, and was soon building my first, true house. It was striped, with leaves on the bottom of each floor, cobblestone on the top of each floor, and oak logs/planks as the ceiling/floor. It was three stories tall with wooden stairs spiraling up.

I decided my first project would be a three deep sorting machine. I know, kind of silly, but I've come to like the things. Well, I built it twenty-two double chests long and three deep. That is, I built the chests. By my calculations, that meant I needed a hundred and ten hoppers. That meant I needed five hundred fifty bars of iron. I was going to be mining for a very, very long time.

In an interesting twist of fate, the evil one apologized. It seems he'd made a mistake, as a lesser deity, in giving me a gift not allowed to mere mortals. With the gift rescinded, I was instead given enough iron to finish the hoppers I needed, and more. It seemed the lesson to take from this was simple: don't accept gifts that seem too good to be true, for they often are.

It wasn't long before I had all the redstone and hoppers assembled, and I started encasing the whole thing in stone brick. I put an auto-smelter in the upper level, then started working on encasing that, too. I wasn't sure what else to put up there, but it felt appropriate as a public building for the faction to use. I only put super common items in it, since everyone seemed to have private chests for "good" stuff.

The hardest part, ironically, was getting frames put together. With no cattle on our own island, I had to go to spawn for them. To avoid clearing out all the cattle in the area, I carefully bred them, only killing as many as I bred. It was slow, tedious work.

After that, I went back to my private island and started collecting rails from the abandoned mineshaft. It was tedious work, and generated a LOT of string, but it was well worth it it. Soon, I would have to decide what I wanted to do with all those rails.

The decision was interrupted by one of my faction members appearing, and getting interested in the sorting chamber. He had ideas for things to add to the list. We quickly maxed out what we had, and found we needed more storage. The expansion began. We got all the redstone wiring, except the comparators, completed to approximately double the capacity in no time. Having help on a project was really fun. Having someone who could look at what was going on and help duplicate it was even better.

For the first time, I was really happy to have other people around me. A bit later, I had noticed two things. First, I had a sign from one of my fellow faction members telling me I'm awesome! It was so, incredibly heartwarming to be appreciated for what I was doing. Second, I had started to notice jumps. It was like I was losing bits of time.

Now, understand, when I shifted between worlds before, it was like time only flowed in the world I was consciously present in. By contrast, with other people present, it was as if I was the one that ceased to exist at times. It was rather disconcerting. I've never lost chunks of time before.

A bit after that, I found myself alone with the mass-storage center. I spent some time sealing in the area and mostly enclosing the huge, empty room above it. A bit after that, I got a true surprise: I had been elected by the most powerful people for a prize. I was flattered, but had no idea what it was for. I mean, I'd just joined this world, and wasn't clear on what I'd done that deserved recognition, especially from people who I'd never seen. There were some idols of them, but I'd never seen the actual people. It was most bemusing.

While I had no idea what I wanted to do next, I went to my private island and started exploring mine shafts. After a while, I had one of the gods start exploring it with me. It. Was. Massive. The only limits seemed to be a few places where it hit bedrock, and a few regular cavern systems it ran into. I finally was reaching the point where I'd collected so many items, it was time to start the private sorting system.

I was just going to be doing a lot of building, no doubt about it.


	14. A Giant, Pink Bunny

The private sorting system was quickly put into place. It didn't have much, but it was enough to get me started. A donation of iron sped things up tremendously. My next task was to harvest my chickens and start a new round. This was where my first issue came: harvesting when well. The new batch of chicks ran out the viewing port and were soon EVERYWHERE! It was a disaster.

I ended up building viewing platforms and sealing up the lower levels to prevent the disaster again. Along with that, I found I was continuously having issues with not enough leather for item frames. I decided to resolve that once and for all: I built a large pen near spawn and herded in cows, pigs, and chickens. I figured a nice sign asking others to be considerate and do sustainable harvesting would probably do the trick, and I had enough food to keep a sizable population in place, anyway.

Work on the mine was getting ridiculous. I had some areas cleared of any signs of wood and cobwebs, but others were still badly littered. There were occasional mob spawns still occurring, and gravel was all over the place. Every time I thought I was getting things under control, it seemed like I found a new section to work on, including a waterfall that appeared to be coming from the ocean floor!

Then, I was invited to see the most bizarre thing I had ever witnessed. The evil one wanted to show off his bunny. Mind you, I had never seen any sign of bunnies. I had seen dogs, wolves, cats, cows, chickens, pigs, even bats, but no bunnies. I teleported to him, and there was, indeed, a bunny. It was around sixteen wool blocks high, made of white and pink wool. It was freaking adorable.

As he continued to work on it, with some feedback from me, at one point it was revealed to be hollow. I couldn't help but shout out, "It's a giant, hollow, white chocolate bunny!" He seemed to really take pride in his creation, even showing me how he'd modeled it after one of his dogs. I guess even an evil being can enjoy the cute things in life. I was starting to wonder if he just felt inadequate and in need of attention. I would have to ponder that possibility.

It wasn't long after that that two major events happened: First, I was asked to explain the sorting system to someone, so he could build it for his faction. It was remarkably satisfying, especially when a second person also started asking about it. Second, I turned one of my spider spawners into an experience grinder. I used water to carry eyes and string into hoppers, and just sat back and killed them. It was remarkably satisfying and easy. With a little experimenting, it was even perfectly safe.

After that, I resumed exploring the abandoned mine shafts. I kept finding more and more unexplored areas. Then, it started opening into caverns, a chasm, holes in the ocean floor dumping in water, and more. I found a normal spider spawner among the ruins. It was massive. I had one of the lesser gods helping me out with simply lighting the whole thing up.

After days of exploration, I had enough iron to expand my sorter. That was important, as I already had a chest full of oak products near the surface that really needed to be cleared out. I expanded it quite a bit, and broke into another cavern! Fortunately, this one was a dead end. I did a few laps to move supplies down to the sorter, then caught my breath as I considered the simple reality that I had tons of rails. I would be adding a rail system up and down, next.

The rail system didn't go in, due to a mass extinction of chickens. I set up a dispenser on a redstone clock to restock my chickens from eggs. After that, I went slime hunting in a swamp so I could set up a chicken farm with water control in our faction's base, too. It wasn't long after that, that there were three chickens ready to grow up and start providing us with lots of meat.

It started to occur to me that the whole faction thing wasn't really paying off. I was getting more help with reclaiming my mines from other factions than from my own faction members. Heck, the other members of my own faction rarely seemed to be around when I had consciousness.

I decided to plant a mushroom farm. Maybe the shrooms would help me get enlightenment on what I should do.


	15. Meeting the Neighbors

As I pondered what I would do about factions, I began working on opening up the chambers beneath my home. I started knocking down walls between chambers, be they "walls" or "ceilings/floors". I wanted the place open, so I could shape it to my own purposes. It was slow, tedious work.

As I continued working, it was people from other factions who offered to help me. There was only one member of my own faction who even appeared, and he was the newest member. Once again, I found myself pondering where I should be.

As I began working again, once again alone, I discovered something disturbing. I was missing most of the rails I had gathered. The person who'd been helping me apparently had psychometry. She was able to determine that it was my fellow fac member who had taken over 700 of them. The same guy who appreciated my sorting system in my faction had "borrowed" some rails without asking. I didn't see any sign of him, and felt really hurt. I cleared my stuff out of the faction and resigned.

Shortly after that, I went to get more leather, and found that, thanks to our psychometrist, someone else had destroyed the gates on my farm near the spawn. The cows were all gone. We tore the place down. I needed a source of leather, too.

I thought I recalled an island that might have cows near my island base, and went looking for it again. Instead, I found a mushroom island! It was a great discovery, until I realized it was already claimed by the largest faction around. I went searching again, and found a desert island, that was inhabited by the evil one. I went in a third direction, and found the island home of the high gods.

I spent a while pondering. Should I start my own faction, a faction of one, or join the faction of the person who'd spent so much time helping me, with no thought of profiting from her assistance. It was when she said she tried to keep neutral between factions, and just be helpful, that I decided to join her.

She showed me around the new base, which was very well built, and had a coherent design. We made our first project to build an auto-sorting system. I added a dropper elevator to the front of it so people wouldn't have to climb up to put things into the system. They also had a manual elevator for people that was just a sequence of trap doors. I offered to put in a piston-powered system for them, but it would take more time to design.

We spent quite a bit of time working on the sorting system, first. It was going to be a double row going down one side of the room, and back up the other. After draining every scrap of iron that both of us had, we had one side of the room complete, except for half the item frames. It was time to set up a new cow farm.

I started searching around the base, and quickly discovered that other bases were nearby. The biggest faction, apparently, was almost everywhere. Cows, on the other hand, were nowhere to be seen. It was as if every animal in the region had been slaughtered. With patience, I finally moved far enough out to find a few cows, and lured them back to base.

Next was training the leader of our faction on how to use this. Item frames cause an issue: it's easy to believe that the item frames control how the mechanism works, rather than viewing them as labels. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I explained how to set things up, and decided it would be very important to put up signs explaining what to do. I also boarded up most of the workings, so people would be less inclined to mess around inside the inner workings.

It was still disconcerting to know that I was missing blocks of time. As I was paying attention, however, I realized something else odd: people disappeared from the world. It kind of made sense, since I was disappearing from my other worlds. It hit me that in my own worlds, time must stop when I wasn't present. Here, time continued to flow for the rest of us. But where was I when time was flowing without me? I had a hazy recollection of someone calling me a "portal master", but it made no sense.

I proceeded to work on harvesting iron. I had plenty of everything else, except iron. Fortunately, friends helped with locate resources, and I even had a newcomer (really a returning long-absent person) ask if he could take up residence in my home. Given the vast amounts of space I had, I didn't really see a problem.

It's interesting. With all the vast space in these worlds, and the vast resources available, you would think people would have no problems with having community areas and respecting boundaries of those who have set up private abodes. My new friend had one of those demigods associated with him, the one that had disrupted my old cow farm. They had formed a faction, and having my friend around seemed to attract trouble.

I had one of those blackouts, again, and when I returned to my awareness, I discovered something odd. There were a ton of torches in front of my smelting station, and someone had stuck a door on the entrance to my home! On the largest of the three nearby islands, there was a house. All I could think of was that the demigod had decided to make harassing me his new, personal project.

I started looking for a new home, further away from all the clutter. I liked the whole "island hideaway" thing, but was really missing swamps and cattle. I passed some promising areas, but none seemed to be far enough away. I wanted to be tens of thousands of blocks away. The problem was, a demigod can chase you, and you can't do anything about it.

There was a part of me that found it utterly galling to be chased away from my own home. Then there was the futility of it. I thought of my private world, where I only had mobs to worry about, and considered leaving this place. People were truly a two-edged sword. They relieved the tedium and solitude I had been surrounded by, but at the same time they brought so many problems. They would quarrel amongst themselves over old differences or just for spite.

I enjoyed being helpful and helping others. With a deep sigh, I paused my headlong flight and went home to look a little closer. I didn't see any signs of things being disturbed, beyond the torches and the door. Nothing had been stolen. I decided to investigate the house. There were a couple signs, where my new friend reminded me to wipe my feet.

The sense of relief that washed over me was remarkable. He was being courteous and helpful. He had not understood my style, but he had tried. I did a little cleanup, including putting the door in a recessed alcove so it would be more subtle. I chose to call it "WingedPanther's Hobbit-hole". I thought of it as my lair, and resumed mining.


	16. Grief and Isolation

I mused on the strange bits of visions I had had. They didn't make much sense. One vision was about a strange woman, with the bones of wings on her back, directing armies of monsters. Another was of people with various weapons, such as rocket launchers and shot guns, killing each other over and over again. By contrast, what I was doing was quite peaceful, even with the occasional creeper.

After a massive mining expedition, and help from friends, I finally had enough iron to complete the faction hopper sorting system. With a little work, I had it complete, and went to get more leather for item frames. That was when I discovered my cows were gone. AGAIN! I was getting frustrated.

I went to the swamp near spawn to build up the cow population there. I decided I would NOT build a pen. It seemed to attract too much attention. Instead, I would just build up the cattle and harvest them. Luckily, one of my friends acquired a few cow eggs. I know, you wouldn't think such a thing would exist, but they did. I was able to start a small herd of four cows, tucked away in my base where it was unlikely others would abuse them.

One of my faction members asked to visit, and soon he was asking to live with me. I agreed, which was right before he left the faction for the large one. Despite that, I let him stay. In a way, it felt like I was slowly building my own, unofficial faction.

After a little more work, I decided it was time to build my nether portal. I hopped through, and was aghast to see two other portals next to it on the other side. My GPS also told me I was in the wrong place. With a deep sigh, I went back through and found myself on the nearby mushroom island. I made some careful calculations, and grabbed resources.

The problem was I was on a floating island of netherrack above a lava pool. Gravel served as my elevator down to an island in the lava. Then I used cobblestone to work my way across to another island in the right area. I built my portal, went through, and was somewhere inside my mines. I had no choice. I would build my other portal DIRECTLY over the lava. With a cobblestone slab, and after fighting off a few ghasts, I finally had my portal.

After another blackout, I decided to go do a round of cow breeding... and found the cow pen empty. This was the third time, and I was getting sick of it. Somebody was targeting my cattle, which I needed for leather supplies. Again, I found myself wondering if this nonsense was worth it. In addition, my chickens were all dead. It had happened before that my chickens had disappeared, but now, I suspected something else.

The gods couldn't tell me who had done it, either. I had to wonder if it was really worth it to hang out on with others if key resources were being targeted. It had been a while since I'd been in my private world, working in peace with only the mobs to worry about. It was time to go back home, and see what I had been missing.

The first thing I had been missing was peace and quiet. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of sheep running around, but things were pretty calm. I had a nether portal network that nobody else was cluttering up. I didn't have other people deciding that I needed a wood floor, or a door on the surface of an island that was so brightly lit that no mob would ever spawn on it. I didn't have thieves swiping hard-earned resources, or people breaking my hopper-sorter system.

All was not perfect, however. I was unable to teleport. Creeper explosions could do serious damage to my structures. I could see clearly the various mistakes I had made in my mining efforts. My villagers, even though unavailable in the world with other people, were still refusing to breed. I decided to deal with them, first. I dropped the doors four levels and decided to give them some privacy. It was for the best. I still didn't want to watch them having an orgy.

I did a little mining with stone tools, being so used to limited resources. I found some iron, but didn't see the smelted bars in my junk chest at the end of sorting. Surprise! I had nearly two full stacks of sorted iron. I also had seventeen diamonds that I could use as needed. I actually had more capacity in my sorting system, than resources to sort. It wasn't that my sorting system was incomplete, but that I simply didn't need to expand it further.

I found myself feeling... content. I am, by nature, a loner. I like to cooperate with people. I like to help people. But with all that said, I am a private person who does not like having "my" stuff screwed with. In the excitement of finally meeting other people, I had forgotten that one, very important fact. It would soon become important to be true to myself, if I wanted to enjoy a world with other people.

I had considered abandoning my home in frustration and aggravation. This time, I was considering leaving it for a very different reason: because I wanted to be able to be alone. To do so, I would need to create my own faction, and find a new home that was far, far away from the current home. I had a new project. I would also need to spend more time in true isolation in my private world. I had been away for so long that I had forgotten about my chicken machine, which I would now be improving on.

I would give myself time to consider. My current faction's leader was missing for a while, and I owed her the respect to at least stick around for a while. She had helped me a great deal in the past, and I wished to show her the courtesy she deserved. Most likely, should would help me in the future, and it was my intention to ally factions. I would spend the time searching for a good site for a new home.


	17. Starting Over as a Hermit

I started by deciding on a good location to start my search in. I had seen that "distant from spawn" was around two to four thousand blocks from spawn. The logical conclusion, then was to find a new home a significant distance further away than that. I had been taken notes of the GPS coordinates of various key locations. I chose a direction and distance, based on that, and began walking.

It was a good thing that I was walking. The telepathic channels were filled with the quarreling and squabbling of children. Shouting, stupid accusations, and even silly appeals to the gods and high gods left me seeking to tune out everything. I did have to check on some vandalism to my crops, but others repaired the damage quickly.

I had clearly made a mistake in letting so many take up residence with me. There were feuds and history going on that I had not been aware of. People did not see that they were hurting others in their petty feuds, and it was threatening to engulf everyone in the world if things were not settled soon.

I walked through several swamps, taigas, deserts, boated over oceans, and still I kept going. One of the gods followed me for a while, curious, it seemed, to see where I was going. He watched for a while as I moved in a nearly straight line, crossing over land and ocean without wavering. I ate on watermelons, paused to kill some slimes, and kept going.

My compass kept me on course, along with the GPS. I traveled for days, pausing only when I had to defend myself from mobs or eat. A while later, as I was nearing my initial search point, I saw a small cluster of cows and calves in a square formation. They were densely packed, though they did start to spread out as I observed them. It was very strange, unnatural seeming.

A while after that, it happened again. Then it happened a third time. In my distraction, I fell in a shallow pit. By the time I got out, I found the herd had grown significantly. The source of the cattle, I soon found, was a newly created demi-god who had taken a liking to me.

He hung around me for a while, encouraging me on, and getting a bit of my plans out of me. After a bit he left, and I continued to my destination. Once there, I found I was in an area with water, extreme hills, and plains. I had seen no sign of a village, but did see something that looked like a swamp tree. I explored a bit, and soon found what I had been looking for, and more. I found a swamp with a witch's hut in it.

This was better than I'd hoped for! I scouted around a bit. There were no villagers to be seen, but everything else was as close to ideal as I could have hoped for. I let my consciousness fade. I had noticed there was a certain amount of control I had over the ability to let time slip past my awareness. It was enough to step out of time and let it flow. I was in no hurry to be about my business. I would select the ideal location and embrace it.

My first structure would be simple: a massive tower, stretching to the sky, and tunneling deep within the earth. I intended for this structure to be the basis for a very, very small faction. Rather than build it out, as others did, I would build it vertically. The result would be a great deal of space in a very, very small area.

I picked a location on a hill above the swamp, and laid down some chests, which I locked. Then began the tedious process of teleporting back and forth between my old home and my new site, carrying approximately a single chest of materials with me each time. I left the vast majority of the infrastructure I had built behind. I didn't want anyone feeling an incentive to "move in" with me again.

As I worked, I saw the further ravages of this stupid war. Crops had been completely uprooted. I was able to claim what I would need for everything except potatoes. I would worry about that later. I left a lot behind, including redstone, smelting systems, hoppers. I wanted a jump start on my new pad, but not to ravage those I was leaving behind. I tried to leave enough supplies behind that they could rebuild after the war they were involved in.

I took a little time to explore around my new home, then. I had taiga, extreme hills, ocean, a large swamp, and plains in the immediate area. I saw no sign of a village, but I could live without that. After the brief exploration, I began digging into my hill. I opened up a diamond shape under it near ocean level, then moved locked chests into it. With my belongings secured from hostile mobs, and surrounded by around fifteen dogs, I expanded the room into a large, square chamber. I then patched up the sections of gravel and dirt with stone, and took a moment to rest.

I had a home. The gods and demigods could find me, of course, but no one else. Better yet, it seemed that one of the warring factions would soon be incurring the wrath of the high gods, and they would be permanently smited. I didn't really care who was dealt with, as long as it ceased to impact me.

I settled in. I would be doing a lot of digging, soon, to establish the basement levels down to bedrock. With those supplies, I would be able to build my tower to the sky. However, I wanted the protection of a faction on my tower. It would be a while before I was ready. I still needed to evaluate whether I would be establishing my own faction.

It was after I returned from a blackout that my decisions was made. I soon found that someone had "decorated" the entryway to my new home with oak planks. I didn't want oak planks. If I had wanted oak planks there, I'd have placed them there. I was irritated. It was time to make my own faction and claim this as faction territory.

I formed the HermitCats faction, with the tag "Cats aren't social!". I immediately claimed a two by three chunk of territory for my new faction, and began securing it. I established a stone brick perimeter at the very edge of my territory, and fully enclosed area to create a two block high space. I lured a couple sheep, cows, and pigs into it, along with my dogs, and secured the area.

My next step was to speak with one of the gods. I wanted no part of the feuds that had been ripping through the world, lately. He was able to declare my faction a peaceful faction. No member of my faction would not engage in battle with anyone else at any time. It was that simple.

Shortly after that, I had my first request for membership. I could not immediately accept. I had drawn too much conflict to myself by recklessly bringing people to my home, before. I would be more careful. I had a faction, which afforded me far more protection. I would also need to set faction rules before I could consider allowing anyone to join me.

My next goal was to set up a farm. I would move up a level, and use the dirt I was collection to establish an underground farm to provide for my needs, and for those of my animals. It would also make the tower I would be slowly building far more obviously visible. I was ready to establish my own place.


	18. Establishing Myself

It took a long time to clear my main chamber, at which point I knew I was starting to get low on food. I had a lot, but it was slowly grinding down, and I had to address the situation. The tallest crop I grow is sugar cane, which is three blocks high. Add a layer of dirt, and I would need a total of four blocks high in the chamber. I decided to build the farm above my ground level chamber, because it would get me a lot of earth, and I already had a ton of stone.

With a lot of work, I ended up with a farm that was around thirty blocks wide, and a little over forty blocks long. There were three water trenches irrigating the land, and I had the beginnings of watermelon, wheat, potato, carrot, pumpkin, and sugar cane. Only a third of the land was being cultivated so far, but I planned to expand that greatly.

My next step was to start digging down to build animal pens. This chamber would only be two blocks tall, the same size as the ground floor chamber. It did break into the edge of a cave, so I put a door in the boundary between my territory and the rest of the cave for easy access. Digging out the area was very tedious. For an extra thrill, however, I could hear the bubbling of lava nearby. I had to be extremely careful to make sure I didn't torch myself in a lava spill.

My next move would be to build up again. I needed a tree farm, and thought an indoor oak tree farm would be ideal. With the amount of stone I was building up, I needed something to blow off the surplus. In addition, I was building up so much cobblestone to smelt that I needed wood for charcoal, because I wasn't finding coal fast enough for my needs.

I decided to deal with the lava threat first. I bored a hole next to the ceiling of the first basement level until it broke into air. I didn't see any lava, so I extended the hole down one, and soon was able to see the lava. After that, I filled it in with gravel.

My next problem was a lack of wood, and a lack of coal for smelting cobblestone into stone. I changed my priorities, I would have to start building a tree farm above my main chamber. I ended up building a chamber that was seven blocks high, with a checkerboard stone/dirt floor. Well, to be fair, I started the process. My goal was to put torches on all the stone blocks, and oak saplings on all the dirt blocks. It would take a while.

With a source of charcoal established, I went back to digging out the level for my pens. I encountered a second cavern as I worked, and made a mental note to explore it when I dug down another level. It took time, but I soon had a cow pen, a pig pen, and about a dozen pens for sheep. I would breed them up as white sheep, and then start dying them for colored wool.

My final step was to repave the floor of the main floor/ceiling of the animal pens in stone brick. I had left the whole thing as plain stone, initially, since I had so many animals in the way. It took some time, and a few rows of trees to smelt cobblestone, but I managed it.

Along the way, I also detected a possible hazard: I was using wooden doors as exterior doors. If someone could apply a redstone charge to them, it would be possible for someone to break into my base from outside. I wasn't at all sure anyone else would think of this, but I decided I wasn't going to risk it. I made all external doors airlocks. There was the outward facing door, and a second, interior door. They could open the exterior door, but not the interior, with redstone, which got them no further in. Only the gods could move freely through my base.

At this point, I started to slow things down a little bit. I could start working on a little mining, start putting together a few gadgets, and generally get some rest while I figured out what to do. I decided to add another level above my tree farm. I put an automatic furnace array in for starters. It didn't work very well. Without redstone to control the flow of fuel/ore, everything just got jammed up in the first furnace, and the other four sat empty. I did some manual massaging to get a bunch of stone and charcoal, anyway.

I only had two pieces of redstone, so most projects were on hold until I got some serious mining underway. I also needed to figure out my advice to anyone who wanted to join my faction. I decided I would post the rules next to the door of my tower, so anyone thinking about joining would be well advised of what they were asking for. The problem was, I hadn't really figured out what that was.

After a little bit of thought, I posted the following outside my door:

"Consider these things before applying for membership:"

"1) This is a peaceful fac. Absolutely no PVP!"

"2) This is a fac about building stuff. You must be able to show basic redstone knowledge."

"3) If you leave the fac, you might not be let back in."

"4) Maturity and civility is expected of all candidates."

I suspected those rules would discourage applicants I didn't want.

My next consideration was what to do with the smelting room. It seemed obvious that I should turn it into a mass storage room as well. I just didn't have enough resources to start on it, yet. I could, however, just make a mass manual storage room along one wall, and build up the auto-storage system on the other wall as it became feasible.

I started collecting resources, and trying to actually use the smelting room. It quickly became apparent that it was horribly, painfully difficult to use. Irritated, and with no immediate smelting needs, I tore it all out. I then went into my private god world, and starting trying to figure out how to build a better one. I was inspired by a video of Tango Tek's automatic smelter, but I wanted to build my own without referring directly to his.

My initial design was large, clunky, and only worked for the fuel. Duplicating it in front for the ores as well would be insane. I tore it out and started again. And again. And again. Finally, I went with a simple design: fuel and ore worked the same way, with fuel in back, and ore one higher in front. I set up a double row of hoppers for fuel, with redstone torches locking the bottom row of hoppers. Fuel would feed along the upper row, and when it hit the last hopper, a comparator would trigger, releasing the torches on the bottom row so they could all suck down at once. With an identical system on the ores, it meant there would be a reasonably even distribution of ore/fuel amongst all the furnaces with minimal effort on my part.

I encased everything in stone and glass, with two access doors, and called it good. I could now drop off smeltables en masse and let them just crank away while I did other things. If something glitched out, I could go in and fix the hoppers as needed.

It had taken a minor mining expedition to get the iron for the smelting system. Next up would be the auto-storage system.


	19. I Wanna Go Back In Time!

I got my first applicant interview. When I asked for a demonstration of redstone skill, I got a simple four repeater clock. I wasn't impressed. I figured I'd ask him to explain my smelter. The system's pretty simple as redstoning goes. The only tricky bit is an extra block to cut the two redstone lines between the fuel and ore detectors. He gave a very general description that watching it work without seeing the redstone could have told you. When pressed for details, he soon said, "I don't care." Needless to say, that, combined with his general lack of maturity to date, did not suffice to gain admission.

I decided to get to work on the sorter, since I had plenty of resources for the first few slots. You would think, after as many of these as I'd built, that assembling an auto-sorter would be simple. Yeah, you'd be wrong. It had been long enough that I'd forgotten how the blasted things work. I looked up some notes, and soon had the thing going again. I hooked the output of the auto-smelter to a dropper-vator and soon had my first six items going. I put a double chest on top of the hopper-pipe from the smelter to the sorter, and was good to go.

Or not. You see, the hoppers were filling the droppers faster than the droppers could empty. Pretty soon, I found that the comparator on the droppers was overloaded, and the whole thing had frozen up. An extra dot of redstone to limit the feed hoppers to the same speed as the dropper-vator and everything was good again.

As usual, however, I was low on iron. Again. Or still. On the plus side, I had so much stone, that I could easily add a level on top of the current one. Shortly after that, I got a call for help from my former fac leader. The sorter I had built for her was gumming up. It took a little while, but I soon had her straightened out, and she was merrily setting filters for the rest of her items.

Next, I was off to hunt for cats with another guy. I got a lot of fishing done, but didn't see any cats. Tired, I returned home to build up my tower of doom. I felt popular, at least.

After one of those blackouts, I came to and had one of the gods offering to show off her new redstone device: a set of dispensers that fire arrows through lava. The result was flaming arrows would rain down on unsuspecting targets. It was very cool, except for one problem. It used interconnected redstone and redstone torches that had a habit of burning out. I offered to show her a comparator/repeater timer that she could use to avoid that problem. It was shortly after that that I was suddenly unable to enter the world. It was as if it had ceased to exist. Very strange.

I chose to address another problem. My villagers weren't breeding. I went into my god world, and was able to quickly recreate the setup I had with the doors barely below the villagers I wanted breeding. Everything worked perfectly. I even sat staring at them, waiting for them to breed. To be honest, I started to daydream a bit, to avoid seeing what was happening before my eyes. I daydreamed of strange beings hopping around and fighting on various landscapes, taking time off to travel about on an airship.

I finally got bored with both my daydreams and watching uglies having sex. It was time to position the doors in my main world at the same level. After a bit of effort, everything was elevated, I was back staring at uglies, and there was no uncomfortable instances of sex. What had gone wrong? Why would they breed in one place, but not the other? It suddenly hit me: the glass access to the doors was under water. Somehow, the water over the glass had somehow interfered. I placed glass skylights in other locations, and was soon rewarded with hot, steamy, ugly sex.

I did some mining and then checked on the uglies. They were still reproducing. I went back to the world with many people, and discovered something horrible. It had somehow gone back in time to before I had arrived. Everything was gone. Everything. Well, after I got to my old base, not everything. A few of my items were floating around on the original landscape. It was really, really weird. I started building up from nothing. It was interesting to hear the moans of others who had lost far more than I had. The gods, however, were busy doing basic restorations of key infrastructure.

I decided this was a good time to rethink my whole strategy on how my base had been laid out. Originally, the front door faced the swamp, and I had stairs along the back wall. The main floor was basically empty, with a farm above that, the indoor tree farm above that, and the beginning of the storage/smelting system above that. Going down was the animal pens and access to the cave system.

This time, I decided that perhaps I should have the stairs at the front wall, and put something more useful than empty space in the main floor. It would actually be a good spot for a storage system, for example. I also wanted to be more aggressive about how I dug down, clearing out large areas before trying to put in flooring. It would generally be safer than putting in a floor and then digging out from under it.

It was shortly after that that I found myself, once again, unable to enter the multi-person world. With a sigh, I returned to my world. I sat wandered around a bit, aimlessly. It is amazing how much you can forget about when you've been away for a while. I saw many things that were of interest. I had the trading system I wanted to build. I started poking at then, but when I passed my chicken "farm" I got truly irritated. I would smash some chickens, and they simply didn't leave me any corpses to roast. It was maddening.

In a fit of frustration, I started tearing the whole thing out. As I did so, I discovered that the chickens had been getting pulled away from the hopper by the piston. No wonder I got no chicken for my trouble! I decided to solve the problem by building a drowning system. I set up a 2x2 pad of hoppers. Those lead to a filter that would catch eggs and send them up a dropper-vator to a dispenser above the hoppers for reseeding. All other items were funneled to a chest for pickup. I wired the dispenser to a comparator clock on a switch, and hooked up four pistons to block water that would fall and drown the chickens from above to another switch.

I set everything up, gave it a test run, and found the redstone wiring for the water was glitching out the egg feed to the dispenser. A little rewiring later, and it was all good. I sealed everything up, lit up the back area, added a service door, and got out. During all that, I also discovered that I was low on wood, of all things, so I built a small indoor oak tree farm next to the chicken farm. This was a miniature version of my old faction design, which I could expand on as needed.

With that settled, I tried for the world with other people again. Success! I began the arduous process of removing the hill, again. At one point, another person asked for admission to the faction, offering diamonds to help with the excavation. I didn't have a test of redstone knowledge available, and could really use the speed and durability diamond pickaxes would give. With a certain amount of misgiving, I accepted.

It was shortly after that that it was revealed that he had been griefing the unprotected spawn for diamonds. I had already crafted a few pickaxes, but that was just unacceptable. After a brief stint with a second member, the HermitCats were living up to their name. Solitude is so blissful, sometimes. This was shortly followed by two MORE people wanting to join my faction. I declined. I couldn't decide if it was even worth having other members, but I surely wasn't going to invite an unknown factor and a PVPer in.

The choices, as I saw it, were two: I could choose to invite people I liked, or I could just close all admissions. A third possibility: I could allow people to submit a request to join, and then analyze their behavior for a while. Regardless, I just wasn't ready to deal with other people.

On my travels back to the site, I had killed several pigs. That supply of food was nearly up. I made it a priority to get the second level farm going, even though the first level wasn't even walled in, yet. I needed food, above all. I quickly got that going, then resumed trying to clear out the first level. It would take time, but I had that.


	20. A Wish For Wings That Work

After another one of those blackouts, I found myself invited to a drop party. Unlike the last time, I knew what to expect... sort of. Because it was a different host, this time we were near the lava levels, and had to dig out the "drops" instead of catch them. This wasn't really a big deal, and I was able to get a massive amount of diamond blocks as a result. I mostly ignored the emerald block phase, going after some stray bits of iron ore and redstone ore that were about. I got quite serious about retrieving the iron blocks, however.

At some point during all this, the inevitable happened. I fell into a lava pit. Now, this wasn't the first time I'd bathed in lava, and probably wouldn't be the last. It was, however, the first time I'd plunged into lava with no way out, and a lot of REALLY good stuff in hand. Given that others had already made the same error, and lost valuable goods, I didn't want to follow suit. I teleported to my faction home, and finished burning to death in peace.

Don't get me wrong, it was excruciatingly painful, but when I resurrected, I was able to pick up all my stuff and return to the party. After the party was over, my next pressing issue was stone. I didn't have any left, and I had a LOT more stone bricking to do. I planted a tree farm outside, since I didn't have the indoor one set up yet, and waited for it to grow while I dug. I would be using charcoal again.

Another strange vision intruded. This time I was a gardener, planting strange plants to defend myself from zombies. It was almost as crazy as my neighbor in the vision. Any port in a storm, I suppose.

My next priority, in between mining out my main chamber, was getting a roof over the garden for the tree farm. I started roofing it over as I had chunks of stone brick to work with, and soon discovered a problem. My plants were uprooting themselves as I covered them. I had to stop and string lighting down the length of the farm at several places before I could finish the covering project.

I managed to finish covering the garden at about the same time I finished clearing out my main chamber. I dumped down a checkerboard of dirt, and dropped a bunch of saplings on it to get started. I was out of coal and charcoal, again. Since I didn't have any walls or ceiling down, yet, I got a chance to watch my trees grow. It quickly occurred to me there was no particular reason to cap their growth.

I had a plan: I would build up my supply of saplings until I had a full tree farm, several harvests worth, and then encase the farm after it was done growing. After all, it wasn't like I was trying to cap the height of my base. Quite the opposite: I intended to make it massive. A giant indoor tree farm could be one of my showcases.

Along the way, I came close to filling in my garden. There would soon be no reason for anyone in this world to go hungry. If I didn't have so much smelting to do, I would have been baking potatoes like crazy, already. I was also rethinking my original plan for the animal farms. It seemed likely that I should create one floor for just pigs and cattle, and another for just sheep. I could probably put an automated chicken farm in my main chamber and hook it into the smelter and sorter. As with all things, there was so much to do, and so little time to do it in.

After some consultation, it turned out there were several levels of demigod, and that it was possible to acquire them. In reviewing those levels, I discovered there was a VERY low level that was of extreme interest to me: flying. After much consideration, I went for it. Soon enough, I was able to swoop to the tops of the trees, and above. I got the top of the tree farm set at just above the tallest I had seen an oak tree grow.

With that framing done, I did some other odd errands, and began thinking about how cramped things were getting. I really, really needed to put that smelter in, and I wanted the chicken farm to feed into it. After a lot of thought, I went with the "large pool" idea I had used before. I set up a water source, controlled by a switch, that would push objects into one corner. That contained a hopper that fed into a dropper-vator to go into a mini-sorting system.

The first filter was for eggs. Eggs would get filtered back into a dispenser over the chamber, with a switch on a comparator clock to trigger it. I hooked up a redstone lamp to the filter's redstone torch as a visual indicator that the system was full. Overload would feed into the next section, which was separated to prevent foul ups.

The next filter was for raw chicken. I intended to feed that directly into the furnace for cooking, along with all other smeltables. That was trickier to set up , because it required a non-existent furnace system for hookup. Worse, I intended to have all other items bypass the furnace and go to an, also non-existent, auto-sorting system.

Fortunately, one of the demigods saw fit to ask me to teach him about sorting systems. In exchange for a lesson, I got a bunch of resources that would help in building all this stuff. It would take a little bit of time, and a new floor, but I would soon have the beginnings of my automated infrastructure built, and the ability to fly was making the process vastly simpler.

Building the auto-smelting system was pretty simple, but getting all the hopper tubing set up correctly from the chicken farm to it was not. At first, I connected the raw chicken line to the fuel line, because I didn't want to lift it up one block. I managed to correct that with a one-high dropper-vator, and then forgot to pipe the feathers down to the smelting output. Finally, I got a platform and chests set up to feed in fuel and ore.

With that, I had chewed through my supply of iron, so I went mining. The ability to fly made mining SO much easier. I could easily navigate through chasm, plug waterfalls, and generally navigate around quickly and easily. Acquiring flight was the best idea I'd ever had, never mind the ability to start building the auto-sorting system at the ceiling without scaffolding. I made this one massive, with five double chests per item. The slow process of building a sorter had begun.


	21. Animal Husbandry

With the creation of the sorter, I was able to easily smelt most of my cobblestone into stone for stone bricks. I quickly finished my last unfinished project: enclosing the tree farm. Once that was completed, I found myself facing three issues: I had no source of leather for item frames (I just love them on item sorters), I was desperately low on iron, and I had no place to put cows. It was time to dig out the basement.

I did quite a bit of digging. I even managed to kill myself in lava, by not watching where I was going and getting stuck in the lava pool under my main floor. Now you might think I'd have been flying, and unable to fall into lava. It's a funny thing. Swinging an axe is a tricky business. When your feet are firmly braced on the floor, and you take a nice swing, you can do some serious damage to stone. On the other hand, if you're in the air, you tend to lack the same force of blow. You face a choice between bracing yourself, or digging slowly. I was digging quickly, and with my wings folded, I fell.

The whole thing was very dull, really. I would do some expansion, switch to some mining, expand my sorter, harvest some wood, expand the base, etc., etc., etc. The satisfaction came in seeing the huge numbers of chests I'd been using as temporary storage slowly dwindle, even as my collected resources steadily increased.

My one, constant annoyance was the furnace. It had a tendency to jam, have items get stuck, etc. I was regularly flicking the switches to unjam either the fuel or ores to be cooked. Given that I didn't need to do too much manual care, however, I wasn't complaining. It did the job quite well, and for that I was grateful.

Another thing I finally did was put my sign on my door. I had redstone devices. I had complicated redstone devices. I was ready to start thinking about who I wanted in my faction, and who I didn't. Two other people in the world were building large, opposing castles. Another had a small house that was quite cute. I wasn't very good at stuff like that, and knew it. I was good at building big things that were automated by redstone. I had the patience to do very mundane labor for days on end.

First, I wanted people who respected what I was doing. I wasn't looking for the ego boost of someone begging me for admission; I wanted people who could share my vision, and expand upon it. Second, I wanted people who could help me. Redstoning skill was always going to be valuable, but it wasn't the only one I needed. People who were willing to gather resources were also valuable. The ability to systematically level and rebuild the tree farm or garden were traits I could respect.

There were a couple of ways I could get what I wanted. First, I could recruit members, carefully, who were useful to me. These would be people who would set aside the adversarial approaches that some people took, in order to build great things. Second, I could trade services, skills, and materials for what I needed. There would always be people in need of assistance with one project or another. If I could play the role of consultant, then perhaps I could leverage that. I could offer mass smelting services to people, for example, for a fee of some of the smelted material or fuel.

There were many items that I was slowly collecting a lot of, that I could probably trade away for good will or items I needed. I used iron at an insane rate, along with coal and wood. Perhaps what I needed to build above my tree farm was something "simple": a trading machine. If I had a device that would allow people to make the trades they wanted, then perhaps I could incentivise them to give me the things I wanted. Then again, I also still needed to build a mushroom farm. I would soon have the stone to do it from excavating my basement.

It was at this point that I suddenly found myself, once again, unable to enter the world with many people. With a sigh, I returned to my private world, and was greeted by a long line of villagers waiting for me to build a trading hall for them. I went ahead and started the process, building a basic chain that would hold twenty-two unibrowed traders. Based on my calculations, it would just barely butt up against my storage area, which was fine.

I checked on the world with many people, and got in! I went ahead and finished the pens floor as a giant chamber, then got some help from a friend getting some sheep, cows, and pigs into it. The breeding program for books, item frames, and meat had begun!

I went ahead and dug out the next level down, and then began framing out around the roof. When I had it high enough to put in most anything I could want, I decided it would be for a mushroom farm. My idea was pretty simple: I'd build chambers that were one block high with a few mushrooms seeded in them. Then, I'd set up some water releases on redstone that would flush the mushrooms into water canals that would carry the mushrooms to me. Basically, I had in mind something similar to Dataless's Veggie Central towers, only horizontal instead of vertical.

Before I could start working on it in earnest, though, I had a request. Someone wanted assistance setting up a small auto-smelter with a dropper-vator output. It took a little work, but it was soon working. It was kind of tricky, because I couldn't place most of the hoppers/chests/furnaces, so I had to direct him on where to place things. Also, he had a smaller space to work with, so some things got twisted around differently from mine. We soon had it working, though.

Next, I found myself speeding up a timing circuit, followed by wiring up another dropper-vator. Then I was back at my own base, harvesting the tree farm and smelting sand into glass for the person who had helped me retrieve my animals. Overall, I was feeling quite pleased with how things were going. I even managed to start building up a pack of dogs! Cats, on the other hand, were annoyingly scarce.


	22. Horses and Power Loss

I had another one of my visions. This time, it was strange, as if two different things were overlaid on each other, yet were the same. In one layer, I was playing a card game. In another layer, I was a grand sorcerer, summoning powerful creatures and casting great spells as I fought other sorcerers. It was very bizarre.

As I returned to my awareness, I decided I wanted a cat. I searched the nearby jungle for one, and saw nothing. I had plenty of fish, but nothing to feed them to. It was quite frustrating. It was at that point that someone else offered to help me, and found an ocelot almost immediately! With some effort, I had a nice, siamese kitty of my very own! One more, and I'd be able to start breeding them.

Somewhere in there, I also had the chance to see the completed castle wall one of the other people had been building. It was literally large enough to encircle my entire base, with room to spare. It also looked far better than what I had constructed. While I had built a place that could feed the server, and had all sorts of automation in it, others were doing artistic things. I chose to accept that I was far from artistic, and do what I enjoyed.

After some more work digging out a subbasement, I realized I had more iron than I'd realized, and finished up the back wall of the sorting system. I had slots for basic minerals, gold and iron, and most of the foods. As I curved around the long, side wall, I planned to put in seeds, next. I was quite pleased with what I'd accomplished.

It took a solid push, and a lot of help from friends, but I got the side wall completed as well. Then I dug out the subbasement and moved down the sheep, and finally set up a workshop with an enchanting table, anvil, and crafting table. I even got my second cat with my herding expert.

Life was feeling pretty good, and then a demigod mucked things up. I don't think it was his fault, but suddenly, all my chickens, cows, and sheep disappeared. Worse, when he tried to fix it, he created insane hordes of cows. It was like his powers were completely out of control. I eventually lured him out while one of the gods helped clean things up.

Overall, I was still very pleased. My next project was the mushroom farm, and figuring out what to do with a handful of mooshrooms I'd been granted.

My next project got delayed when I found myself locked out of the multi-person world, once again. In my solo world, I chose to take a little time for some mining, when I started to notice some strange things. First, the villagers were making this weird "hrmm" noise all the time. It made very little sense, and they were in the middle of a rather disturbing orgy.

The other thing that was bizarre was the behavior of the zombies. I had done a lot of mining, and was used to lighting up an area to keep myself safe. This time, I had put a large light barrier around myself, but they were still locating me and attacking me. It was rather disturbing.

Next, I went into the multi-person world. The first disturbing thing that happened to me there was that I couldn't fly. At all. All the factions had been dissolved, too. As the telepathic chatter continued, it was soon revealed that we couldn't teleport, that people couldn't remember where their homes were, etc. On the plus side, people were suddenly finding horses. I quickly made a bed and slept in it, for the first time in this world.

I went ahead and harvested my farm, thinned out the cow population, built up the pig and cow population and decided to be a bit mean. You see, people were starving to death, repeatedly. Meanwhile, I had over 1000 units of food, and no way to get anywhere near anybody. So I let people know. One person decided to try and make the trek on horseback. That didn't get him far, as I'd had to cross many large oceans to get to my home.

If he'd made it, I would have given him food to bring back to the others. Unfortunately, after a long, long period of time traveling, he died. I did a round of breeding on my dogs and cats, then started harvesting my tree farm. At nearly full capacity, it took a long, long time to slowly work it down to where I could safely harvest it from the ground.

While I was doing that, it was interesting to notice the changes. Gods and demi-gods were now mere mortals, their powers vastly reduced or gone. It was clear that many of us had become dependent on the ability to teleport about for quick navigation, rather than knowing where we were and how to get from one place to another.

I was fortunate, I had a few key locations noted, and was able to give some directions to others. Despite that, it was still difficult times for people, as many of them were not used to the idea of starting from scratch. Don't misunderstand; I considered myself quite fortunate to be in my base, and to have so very much food and resources at hand. But I had come into this world not so long ago, and fended for myself just fine. I'd had help, but I hadn't felt intimidated by having nothing in a very long time.

I really missed my wings.


	23. Horses Appear

Suddenly, it was as if the incident with no teleportation, no factions, etc had never happened. I could fly, the food I had harvested suddenly wasn't, etc. I decided to start digging my next level. Suddenly, one of the demigods took an interest in me and deposited a horse in the area. That seemed reasonable enough, and even fortuitous. Then another horse appeared. Then chunks of diamond ore were scattered about.

With a sigh, I proceeded on my course, digging out the chamber for the new horse pens. Once it was dug out, my assistant (not in the fac, but very helpful), came up with the idea of selling horses. For 30 gold ingots, we would produce and deliver one foal. We had a purchaser, we got the foal out, started flying, and in a sudden moment of vertigo, I lost my ability to fly and crashed to the ground, taking the foal with me. We both died a horrible death. Our second attempt was much the same.

Finally, I decided to fly strictly over water, and make very careful approaches to land, so I could lead the horse as it walked. I had some vertigo fits, that seemed to be related to my speed of flight, but started making progress. I was starting to regret this entire enterprise. We'd have done better to help search for horses locally, rather than try to transport them around 40,000 blocks.

I took a detour to my god world. My wiki was telling me that I could use golden carrots, which needed vastly less gold to create than golden apples. Even better, I had far more carrots than apples available to me.

Next, I went to my private world. I didn't see any horses, but I decided it was time to get a private cow farm. I created a small room in my base to store the cows, and then used a couple leads to get two cows into it. At one point, I had two cows on leads at the same time. It made it so much easier to move animals around, compared to trying to lure them around with food.

In the multi-person world, I found that the stairs up from the horse pens had been widened, and that there were now several horses hooked to fence posts by leads. That was all good to see, but the massive wall through the room was not. I would have to do something about that. Don't ask me why, but I like massive, open spaces in my base.

I decided to start digging down, clearing out the column of space under the stables. I'd made a little progress, when I got a request for another horse. Don't get me wrong, I didn't mind honoring the request, but it would work so much easier if I had a nether delivery system set up. To accomplish that, of course, I would have to set up my own nether portal, which I wanted to do at the lava layer. I started digging down a staircase.

It's an interesting thing to note that it is a LONG way down from sea level to the lava layer. Digging a simple staircase down took a long time. I did manage it, when I got a request for clay. Interestingly enough, I don't spend much time mining clay. It's usually in rivers, swamps, etc, and is usually under water. It's a bit of a pain to get. I'm also a pushover. I used signs and stone bricks to give me air pockets under water (don't ask how the heck a sign can make a breathable air pocket). Once that was done, I could quickly dig out the clay, cook it, and hand it over.

In the process of doing THAT, I discovered that my sorting system had glitched out. Everything was going into my stone chests. With a sigh, I fixed that, and tore up the front wall to clean out the mis-sorted junk. Shortly after that, I found my dropper-vator was clogged. I sorted THAT out next. Redstone gadgets can be temperamental.

I finally got back to my mining process. Now that the double-wide stairs were in, I started putting in the outside wall. At the time, it was stone, dirt, and minerals. I wanted, as usual, for the whole thing to be stone brick. I dug out the outer wall and replaced it. In the process, I dug out enough resources to consume my full stock of coal and charcoal. It was time to go back to the tree farm and harvest the whole thing.

As I started working, something weird started to happen. I kept teleporting backwards, and and branches would un-break, and eventually, I just couldn't seem to do anything. It was like I was in a weird time loop, where the only thing going forwards was the telepathic conversation of others. After a bit of patience, the time loop stopped, and I was able to resume clear-cutting my indoor forest.

An age and a half later, I replanted it and considered my charcoal needs met. I made my next step to resume working on the outside wall. I quickly completed the front and started on the side wall. About partway through that, a new individual decided to watch what I was doing. He did strange things, like challenge me to a fight, and then ask me for diamonds. I finally tossed him a few to get him to be quiet, and I was rewarded with 32 golden carrots. Suddenly, I felt like he'd done me a true favor, and brought his total up to 16 diamonds from me.

He soon wandered outside (with some help from me), and formed a new faction. It was a bit irritating. There was a decent chance he would establish a base next to me. I was too well established to worry about it, now. I also had my first critique of my base from someone else. He noted that I have a lot of stuff, but he was very unimpressed with my decorations. He thought I should be using glowstone instead of torches. His home was mostly cobblestone, which I don't care for too much.

Perhaps it was time I stop inviting just anyone to my base for a gander. On the plus side, my fac was finally flagged as peaceful, again.


	24. Betrayal!

I continued my efforts, finishing the third and fourth walls down to the lava layer. Then I cleared out the layer so I could place the nether portal wherever seemed best. Unfortunately, I couldn't decided whether I wanted to place it at that layer, or dig down a little further and place it on bedrock. There were a few people I'd ask the opinions of.

I decided, since I had a few mooshrooms, I'd go ahead and seal them in and breed them. Then I stuck my nose out. Sure enough, there was a tiny little hut on one of the swamp islands across from my base. Next, I want to a mushroom island I'd noticed a short distance from my base to dig up some mycelium. Unfortunately, I didn't have a silk touch shovel, so all I got was dirt.

I enchanted a couple shovels, which failed. I decided to start building where I'd be placing the mushroom farm anyway, and discovered that I could use the handful of mycelium blocks I had to populate the area, anyway. With that being the situation, I started building. I set it up with a central trench, and water would flush all the mushrooms into it. I began the massive build.

I found myself suddenly kicked out of the multi-person world, so I went back to working on the villager trading system. I did some quick calculations, and figured out that I needed sixty-six sticky pistons, and twenty-two regular pistons. I had all the resources I needed, except for slime balls. I made a quick run to the swamp, killed a bunch of slimes and hyper-aggressive zombies, came back, harvested my tree farm, and then had a full set of pistons.

I returned to the multi-person world, and discovered another time reversal had happened. I had only lost a little work, and it was soon restored. Then I put in a bunch of pistons hooked to two levers, put water over the extended pistons, and covered the whole thing in stone bricks.

With that, I returned to the issue of my nether portal. I decided to go ahead and build it above bedrock. I would dedicate the entire bottom-most floor to it. I began carefully digging down, not bothering with the obsidian at the moment. That would be challenging enough to deal with as it was, I didn't need to go fighting with it when a couple blocks might come in handy in their current positions.

I returned to my private world and resumed working on the villager trading system. I started carefully digging out the area that would contain the redstone. It was a painfully slow process, but definitely worth the trouble. I got about half of that done, is when I decided to go be social again.

In the multi-person world, I started the process of digging down to bedrock. I was being tediously careful. My goal was to dig down until I started seeing pieces of bedrock, then cover over that layer with stone brick. I did the front wall to mark the depth, and then started crawling along the left wall. It was remarkably dangerous work. I had pockets of lava that were three to four blocks deep that I was trying to preserve for obsidian.

I also had it in mind to possibly preserve a chunk of lava for a cobblestone generator, but had pretty well lost interest in that idea. My intention to completely excavate everything meant I would never run out of cobblestone any time soon. Besides, it was dangerous enough trying not to fry myself without creating an area of lava that was just begging to scorch me.

I did a few animal feedings, which gave me enough experience to be able to partially repair my super-pickax: Litter Scraper. It was able to dig through obsidian far vaster than a regular diamond pickax, and that helped speed up the process of digging through it. After collecting quite a bit of the stuff, however, I was starting to think I would do better off filling in the lava pits with gravel, rather than trying to collect mountains of obsidian.

With the four walls lowered to just above bedrock, I had a bunch of obsidian. I just couldn't seem to help myself, the Litter Scraper was making the process of getting obsidian bearable, and there was a chance it would be useful, too.

My next step was to dig out all the dirt and rock around the lava/obsidian pockets. That allowed me to quickly get about half the floor dug out and replaced with stone bricks, and gave me a nice sense of accomplishment. It also let me clearly see the islands I would have to deal with, and address them one by one.

As I worked, I contemplated ideas for encasing the nether portal in some sort of redstone enclosure. The ideal would be some sort of double door system that was controlled by buttons hooked to a flipflop, with all the redstone hidden away. Another possibility was to have a trigger that would raise a set of stairs up to an elevated nether portal, like a sort of shrine. I'd figure it out later.

As I continued working, one of the newer people at the world asked to teleport to me. I accepted, as was my habit, and didn't see him. With a shrug, I continued working, when a potion suddenly splashed on me and started hurting me. Soon, the place was crawling with witches. It took me a bit to realize that he had been invisible, and had acquired god powers, somehow. Fortunately, a legitimate god appeared soon to clean up the mess.

I found myself rejecting teleport requests after that. I had already been burned so very many times, you'd think I would know better. This was followed by a new person begging, whining, to join a fac. Any fac. He showed no discernment, just a desperate desire to have someone take care of him. I gave him some food to get him off my back. Soon he was pleading for free saddles, as if they weren't incredibly rare items. He soon became this annoying buzzing in the back of my mind as I finished clearing half the room.


	25. The Road Through Hell

I returned to my private world to work on the villager trading system. I carefully set everything up according to my plans... and the top lock wouldn't stay locked. All the villagers went into one slot. I would have to seal things up and start over from scratch.

I went back to the multi-person world and resumed mining out the floor. It took a while, but I eventually finished, with a chest of obsidian as my reward. I then put in a nether portal and went through. When I checked my GPS, it seemed like I was too high, but it was a nice area, encased in netherrack. Then I went back through and found myself at the imposter's base.

With a sigh, I got supplies, took careful note of coordinates, and went back. I dug down from his portal output and got to where I wanted mine. I built it, lit it, and went through. I was in! Next, I claimed the nether territory for my fac, so I wouldn't lose it in the future. I wanted VERY controlled access to my base through this portal. If I was going to be sending out horses through this, that would be a priority.

It wasn't long after that that I got some good news: my neighbor had joined another fac, and all his territory was unclaimed! I tore down the majority of it, and let him retrieve his stuff when I saw him next. I would not be making the mistake of letting strangers out of my base in the future. I then sealed off and claimed the upper portal, for good measure.

Soon, a new twist happened: the idiot who had spawned witches in my basement had formed a new fac, and declared war on a fac that had two of my friends in it. There was a lot of telepathic screaming back and forth that I tried to avoid. There were accusations of "cheating", whatever that might be, and a lot of angst.

In the middle of all that, while I was scouting for a good exit portal for my horse sales business, I stumbled across the new base. It was odd, there was a main entrance in the middle of the ocean, and then a powered rail system down to their "real" entrance. You needed to carry buttons with you to open the iron doors. I just couldn't figure out how they had gotten all those rails, unless they had god powers while building it, which seemed likely.

Soon after that, two of the troublemakers had been promoted to temporary gods. This caused quite a bit of angst among the mortals, and seemed to result in a lot of conflict and finger-pointing amongst the gods. I could only hope the temporary status would be just that, and not permanent. While that was going on, I worked on my horse tunnel through hell.

Getting my tunnel above the lava level of the nether was fairly uneventful. I only struck one lava pocket, which was easily sealed. Once on the "surface", I launched in a straight line towards my target. This led me past a nether fortress, which I raided for several pieces of horse armor and some nether wart, along with pushing me to build under a lava waterfall.

Did you know lava behaves differently in the nether from the overworld? It turns out, lava likes to "splooge" wide, which meant my little ceiling resulted in lava flowing under it, making things rather tricky to navigate. It took several false starts before I finally managed to get my tunnel through it without getting singed once!

I quickly realized that I was burning through my supply of stone at an incredible pace. For a third the resources, I could place JUST the floor to run along, and leave it to them to avoid ghast fireballs and such. I'd put up walls and ceilings, as needed, to stay safe from lava, but no more. It was at about that time that I discovered my sorting system was glitching again. I would have to fix it... again.

A few moves later, and I had the eight or so filters fixed. I would have to keep an eye on those things. I then decided to make use of the nether wart I'd collected in a nether fortress I'd raided. I started building a nether wart farm the size of an entire level, with a few glowstones scattered about the floor for light.

With that done, I returned to building the nether pathway while I contemplated the wisdom of my most recent decision. I had applied for godhood. It was something I had avoided for a while. Being a god is a great responsibility, and it's very easy to get a power trip where you use those vast powers to short-circuit the hard work of collecting and processing resources.

This impressions was soon confirmed, when one of the newer gods decided to help me and my, now two, assistants build our road through hell. He was able to simply build without having to restock, he actually restocked us often, and with no fear of the lava. I found my role changing, as I fought off ghasts to protect the other, earthbound mortals. At one point, I also ended up lighting up a couple of blaze spawners. I had some VERY intense battles to secure the route.

On the plus side, we made a LOT of progress, getting to the forty percent point. We also located a possible exit that would be a little bit closer. We would have to check with the owner before we used it, though.


	26. Griefing and Anti-Griefing

With a lot of hard work, we finally finished the horse path through hell. With a great deal of fanfare, three of us rode the entire length, dodging ghast fireballs and generally having a grand time racing each other. Some of the turns were a little harrowing, as missing the turn meant splashing into lava, but it was fun, overall. I could put up barriers at the corners for safety, later.

On a downer, I found my application for godhood rejected, because I wasn't verbose enough. But enough on that subject.

Being a bit anal retentive, I had to go put up the barriers. Safety first, and all that. While I was doing that, I also scavenged soul sand for my nether wart farm. Soon, I had the corners safe, and enough soul sand to finish my nether wart farm. I did a quick harvest and replanting, and had a quarter of the room filled.

With that project done, I went back through the nether to raid nether fortresses. Along the way I found several blaze spawners, which gave me a lot of experience as I swooped through the air, dodging fireballs and cutting them down with my sword. With the blaze rods I collected, I built my first brewing station. I would definitely have to figure out how to make that thing work, as I'd never brewed a potion before.

Next, I started chopping down trees with a stone axe, and used an iron block to repair it to build up my repair skill. It also built up my woodcutting skill, letting me greatly increase the volume of logs I got from my tree farm.

After doing that for a while, I did some research on how to set up a shop, so people could buy food from me, and then started clearing out the column of stone inside my basement between the horses and nether portal.

Setting up shops got me to thinking. We can do jobs, but I'd never really looked into it. It turned out I could take three jobs to make money. I eventually settled on Mining (I do a LOT of that), Farming (I do a LOT of that for the store), and Woodcutting (I do a lot of that). Making money to do what I wanted to do anyway just made sense to me.

So, I finally got around to reapplying for godhood. I'd initially tried to be politically correct in my reasons for wanting godhood. This time, I chose to be a bit more blunt. Some of the newer gods, including those who were made mortal again, seemed like questionable choices. The only way I saw to improve the quality of candidate was to be one. Surprisingly enough, it did the trick to get my application approved. I wasn't clear if that meant I was about to be a god, or if my application had merely been approved as being complete.

I did three things to fill my time after that. First, I started hollowing out my sub-basement for use in whatever I could think of. Second, I harvested on my tree farm. Finally, I dug out a LOT of sand. I needed glass for bottles, so I could start brewing potions.

While doing a little research, I noticed that I could cure zombie villagers, who appear at random near my base, with a splash potion of weakness and golden apples. That gave me a great idea! I could make a villager spawner in my base! The only problem with that idea is that it would require me to create a light path all the way up to the sky.

I started considering ways to punch a glass "hole" through my base, which could be used both for a villager spawner AND a nether beacon, when it occurred to me that I don't really need infinitely many villagers. What I need is a LOT of villagers, and the ability to kill a bunch of them off easily when they get too annoying. Except, whether doing the massive spawner, or a limited one, I still needed that light punched up to the sky. I would also need to rework my front door so the wood doors in it wouldn't interfere with the system.

I could figure out the details as I worked. It would be cool if I could set up a villager trading system and start generating MASSIVE resources. I would probably want to do a small setup, to avoid incurring the wrath of the high gods. If I could also use the setup to double as a zombie mob trap... I was simply going to have to set up that glass skylight. There was no way around it.

While I was at it, I'd make that skylight the light for a beacon. Getting the skylight set up was easy enough. I put it through the center of my base, just slightly offset from where my nether portal was. I replaced sections of floor with glass, including a pillar of glass through my tree farm. The bigger problem was the base of my beacon. I had enough diamond blocks from drop parties for it, but I really didn't want to commit that much diamond to my beacon. With a deep sigh, I went to the official store.

$150 per iron ingot was the cheapest option I had. For a fully powered beacon, I would need 1476 ingots, and I had barely over a hundred. That meant over $200,000, when I didn't even have half that. I made a telepathic plea. I would buy from whoever would sell. I was rewarded with a generous gift of iron blocks, that suddenly brought me close enough that I could buy the rest. The base of my beacon soon rested on the edge of my nether portal. Everything in my base felt its effects.

I began mining out my basement again, and was making good progress, when something odd occurred. A couple newer people started harassing one of our little clan. He wasn't in my fac, but was a nice enough guy. Then they wanted to buy some supplies, which I teleported them into my base for. One started attacking my dogs, so I quickly sealed off all doors. They left with nothing to do in my base.

Soon, I heard they were on my nether path, tearing it up and headed towards my base. I checked to ensure the doors were closed in the nether (they were), and then started following behind them making repairs. It was stupid and annoying, but so be it. People who had helped me build it were concerned, and I didn't want them upset. It wasn't long before I got word that they had reached the doors to my nether portal.

I wasn't concerned. Don't misunderstand me, I wasn't ignorant of the reality that they could break in. It was just that they'd have to go UP quite a distance, and then come back DOWN that same distance inside. Unless they could fly, the fall would kill them. I got there just as one committed suicide in the lava and then hopped out. I claimed the spoils as payment for the stone brick I'd had to use. A few cosmetic repairs later, and the entrance to my nether portal, nether side, was back to normal.

On a side note, I was not on the waiting list to become a god. It felt kind of good.


	27. Redstoning and Frustrations

I decided to make sure my nether entrance was truly secure as a first step. I quickly walled off all access to my nether portal, and then went back to work. It wasn't long before I had the breeding area and doorman area set up. The one downside was that I had NOT set up lighting. Soon, I had mobs spawning in my base and hunting me down. I set up some fences and a gate, figuring I could just kill them at my leisure. The problem is, I got some spiders that crawled over the fences. So much for being thorough.

Soon, one of the people who had helped me earlier a bit started begging to join my fac. I deferred, noting that I was not, at the time, accepting membership applications. Normally, this is enough for people, but this guy begged. Then he pleaded. Then he whined. Unfortunately for him, he'd also been engaged in combat with other people recently, harassing some new people.

I have one major rule above all others. No one in my fac will fight people. There are enough skeletons, zombies, and creepers in the world for fights. If you really want a fight, find a blaze spawner. Picking on new people is just low. Finally, I told him he would have to demonstrate to me that he can not fight BEFORE I would let him join. When he asked how long that would take, I could only tell him "a while".

He proceeded to slaughter humans in a disappointed rampage. I continued excavating.

Next, I found myself hired to rig up some redstone, so two switches would control the gates for a racehorse circuit. I made a handy $1000 off it, and was quite satisfied with myself, to boot. After that, I helped a guy get his farm started.

All my mining had led me to a shortage of charcoal, so I went back to harvesting logs. It was then that I discovered the TRUE power of my tree feller ability. You see, I had worked the size of my unharvested farm down enough that it started kicking in again. I would hit a log, and a layer of the farm would be harvested. I would hit another log, and another layer would go. Soon I had the farm cleared and a new batch planted.

As I started harvesting it, the guy who had started a faction right next to my base started begging me to join my faction. Then he started begging me to let him build a base close to my faction. I kept him locked in my base, where he couldn't do anything, while he begged and pleaded, offering various distances, etc. All this after I told him I couldn't stop him from creating a base next to mine, but wouldn't help him, either. The annoyance factor was unreal. The thought of him as a neighbor was even more annoying.

A bit later, I found myself unable to enter the multi-person world. I'd heard rumors that the high gods had created a new world, and bored, I joined it. It was... different. To start with, most of it was flat. I mean, really flat. It was super-flat. It had a single building with unlimited materials in chests, but the selection of materials was fairly limited, too. The basic blocks you can mine and refine were available, but no nether blocks, obsidian, etc. I could make redstone torches, repeaters, standard pistons, and not much else. I couldn't even make a sticky piston. This was no redstoner's paradise.

Still unable to enter the regular world, and bored with cleaning up from some people who'd randomly trashed the place, I decided to experiment a little. Someone else killed me. The whiner, to be specific. Fine, I could move further away. I had only gone a short distance, when I was informed that I had reached the end of the world. With a deep sigh, I left. This simply wasn't for me.

With a little effort, I was able to get into the world with my faction tower, and get back to what I do best: making crazy huge stuff. With a seed gift of sand and cactus, I even started a cactus farm. One thing was starting to cross my mind, however. I had watched recordings of other worlds. I was now building massive a structure in the multi-person world that I enjoyed. And my private world was starting to feel... disappointing.

I found myself rarely visiting it anymore, and when I did visit it, I was increasingly unhappy with it. The ability to fly, the ability to build up powers (like taking down a forest in a few chops), these were things that drew me to prefer being in the multi-person world. I often visited my god world for doing design work, like designing a trap for someone who decided he didn't want to provide the components need, or figuring out the mechanics of the villager trading system.

I considered what I really wanted, more than anything, in a world. First, I wanted to be happy with what I was making. I'd made a mistake in my private world. I was trying to build small and cramped, instead of making it mine. I had two choices, either start over in a new private world, or start rethinking my entire base. Perhaps I should move it to the first outpost. I desperately needed to figure out what, if anything, I would do with it.

Due to being unable to enter the multi-person world again, I sat and looked at my villager trading system in my private world. All the villagers were falling into one slot. With a deep sigh, I tore open spots in the wiring to investigate what was happening. After long searching, I found I had forgotten the redstone torch that passed the pulse signal up to the upper two pistons... and in the process got the pistons out of sync with each other. It was frustrating. I would NOT be using this design in the multi-person world.

Finally entering it, I used my treefeller skill to level my indoor forest in no time and turn it all into charcoal. I would need that charcoal to smelt cobble into stone as I continued to dig out space for the sorting system. Soon I was blocked out of the multi-person world... AGAIN! I was getting frustrated. On the other hand, I soon had a new design that seemed to be far, far more robust and less twitchy. It was not nearly as compact, but it seemed to be stable, which counts for a lot.


	28. Searching For a Brave New World

Finally! I got into the multi-person world... and my beacon was gone. A little exploring quickly revealed that time had gone back, again. Not as far as the last time, and my skills and money were the same, but I had lost a lot of work.

I quickly knocked down my tree farm to get the charcoal supply I would need. Next, I bought the iron I needed for the beacon. I would NOT be wasting time without that in place. For the beacon, I also needed sand for glass. I found a sandy island, and took an enchanted shovel to it to annihilate the sand on it.

Soon I had my beacon back, a growing wood farm, and was reexcavating for the villager system. It was around then that a new person, recently evicted from another world, joined us. Apparently, he'd been evicted for being a jerk. Despite that, I let him in my place. He promptly started killing my dogs and cats. When I locked him away from my dogs, while I was with them, he requested to teleport to me again. I went into my work room, locked the doors, and then obliged him. Then I teleported out.

He soon gave up and moved on. A bit later, I got thinking about how one of the gods who had helped me lost her sorting system to the last time reversal. With resources provided by her, I soon had an automated sorting system set up for her to use.

After one of my usual blackouts, I tried to enter the multi-person world again... and couldn't! I could sense the presence of people in it, five of them, but my efforts to enter it were blocked. I caught a faint whisper that everything was reset. The world had somehow become unstable, and was being reset. The gods were rebuilding essential elements in it.

In frustration, I sought out a new world. The first one I entered had eight portals, four of which were active. When I entered one of the portals, I was taken to a new world, where I could choose the type of zombies I wanted to fight. I didn't want to fight zombies, I wanted to build. In frustration, I left, never to return.

The next world I tried had more options. I chose survival, and found myself in a place that was incredibly, horribly crowded. In the time it took me to try to find some free space, night fell and zombies swarmed me. I was dead, without any equipment. I left, but would consider returning.

My next attempt seemed better: it was smaller, and it didn't take me too long to find an ocean. The ocean went on forever, or so it seemed. Suddenly, I found myself evicted from the world for... flying! Granted, boat speeds are pretty good, but flying? Really? I went back in and boated more slowly. After a while of additional boating, I gave up and left.

I quickly realized that a huge, populous world is not for me. I wanted a world where I could find a spot to do my thing, and be relatively uninterrupted. The worlds I was finding were full of people who had already done that, and claimed their spot. Then people who had moved past them, and past them, and... you get the idea. I quickly crossed the populous worlds of my list of places to explore.

My next world was a smaller world, with factions oriented around person vs person combat. With a bit of travel, I quickly got beyond the boundaries of where others had built. Traveling further, and further still, I came to an isolated bit of jungle that seemed like it would suit my needs. There were cows, plenty of wood to get me started, and land with sandy beaches. I created a faction, HermitCats again, and started clearing space for a four by four chunk base.

Clearing the space took a LONG time. I quickly tuned out the telepathic chatter. It ranged from auctions that I didn't have the money for, to cussing matches, to advertisements for creating your own multi-person worlds. As soon as night fell, the sun would teleport to dawn. The few mobs that managed to appear would be annihilated. I soon found myself asking, "Why am I here?" I had no answer. I was essentially working by myself, with no interaction with others, in a world where some of my key resources would be hard to acquire.

I tried another world. There were duels on a regular basis, but no conversation. I strolled around a bit, and saw places that were half-destroyed. Ocelots were everywhere, but no one offered an explanation for it. I quickly left, again. "Spleef" didn't sound interesting to me, even less so after researching it.

As I figured it, the problem was simple: I was seeking worlds that supported factions, which I knew, when I didn't really want combat. I decided to change my search to look for nearly normal worlds. Soon after that, I entered a small, mostly normal world. There was an active combat area that was easily avoided.

Apparently, this new world was mostly water. I could boat for thousands of blocks without spotting any land. I would finally find a decent looking bit of land, and there would be signs of habitation and assaults. I kept moving. Finally, I stopped seeing signs of habitation, but couldn't find the swamp I was looking for. There was one, very strange thing about this world: there were almost no monsters about. Even when I did find a good place to set up shop, I went several nights without any signs of hostiles. That would be bad for my quest for slime balls.

I built up my tree farm and a small wheat farm, for starters, and quickly dug down to get mining underway. I did a double-back when I encountered an underground pond, and soon came out in a cavern near the lava layer. I quickly got an area lit up (not that it really needed it), and started excavating an area for a tree farm underground. In between that, I also moved my wheat farm to the underground farm. Once I had a large supply of wood and saplings, I moved everything underground, leaving no signs that I'd ever been there, and sealed up the entrance.

It might seem odd that I was doing this, but I'd had some conversations with a few others on a limited telepathic channel. One thing they recommended was having a purely underground base. I took it to heart. I would become a vegetarian living in the depths of the earth. The few bits of leather I would need, I could buy at the shop. I would probably get some potatoes and carrots, as well.

The old multi-person world was still locked to me. If they didn't let me in soon, I might be too committed to this one to go back. Even if I did go back, I was likely to take a rather different approach to building my home from the last time. I wondered how soon I would stop bothering to check.


	29. Iron Farms and Failure

I continued working on excavating the space for the tree farm, and discovered something disconcerting: enemy mobs were starting to appear. A creeper blew up near me, taking out some blocks. I wasn't used to that at all. I had gotten very used to creepers blowing up and NOT damaging the landscape. Despite all that, I soon had a massive underground tree farm. My wheat farm was also doing well, and was effectively feeding me.

I started to do a little exploring, and found my chests, workbench, and furnaces were just a little too vulnerable for my liking. I moved those up into a cubbyhole above the tree farm. I also planted some watermelon seeds I found in a chest in the nearby abandoned mineshaft next to the tree farm. I wanted potatoes, but I was established.

The commissary had a drop party, but this was far more modest than what I was used to: cooked meats. I stored those away for safe keeping. They would be my emergency backup. I finished securing my cubbyhole by putting four pistons at the entrance triggered by a single switch. The redstone was exposed, but I didn't expect to see many visitors.

I did a full harvest on the tree farm, then harvested my few watermelons to get a full crop planted. My next goal was to pursue a rumor of an iron farm. If I could find it using the GPS coordinates, I'd be able to collect enough iron to satisfy my needs for a while. I spent a lot of time traveling by boat, but ended up dying shortly before reaching my destination. It was disappointing, but I accepted the results and decided I'd be safer just mining for the iron I wanted.

I was considering mining back up to the surface to retrieve a couple cows and sheep, maybe even chickens. If I could get a few slimes killed, I could even get a hidden entrance going, where I'd be able to seal the entrance and hide it. It had a lot of appeal. I just wanted to have my supplies without poking my head up.

It occurred to me to try digging my way to the iron farm, since I was doing some branch mining anyway. It quickly occurred to me that the distance was far too great to make that a practical idea. Instead, I built a nether portal and grabbed some obsidian. With only about a thousand blocks to go by nether, and armed with a few diamond picks, I was quickly able to get to the iron farm AND pick up some much needed nether quartz.

The iron farm wasn't in the best of shape. I made some efforts to clean it up a bit, added some hoppers to collect the iron into a chest for me, and generally did minor maintenance. I also harvested some leftover redstone and a couple carrots from the abandoned base there. I was quite pleased, overall.

I hung around until I'd collected nearly two stacks of iron. Then I returned home. My next step was to concede that I needed access to the surface. I dug back to the surface and set up sticky pistons to a switch to hide the entrance from sight. I then used a couple of leads I'd found to haul cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens down into pens I made next to the wheat farm. I even got to kill a slime!

Somewhere during that, a "drop party" was held. I'd had experience with drop parties on the old multi-person world, and this was far more modest than the old one. Instead of tons of diamond blocks, I got a few diamonds. Leather, leads, various types of food, even a few slime balls were dropped. Nobody got many of any item, and a few missed a desired item. Overall, nobody got anything they couldn't have acquired on their own with a little effort, so nobody was overly upset if they missed it.

Soon after all that, I went to spawn to offer someone some food, and found myself unable to teleport home again. The gods assured us they were working on the problem. I took time to get a few books from the library and check out some of the gods' model villages.

On a whim, I decided to enter a new private world. I appeared in a large desert. Behind me was an ocean, before me was forest. A short distance away was a swamp. I accepted this as a world with opportunity, but soon ran into a significant problem: food. I soon found myself hiding in a hole in the ground as my tiny wheat farm grew. I needed wheat for bread, and had to stay still so I wouldn't get any hungrier. It was a tense time, with spiders overhead and skeletons in the trees as I waited for my wheat to grow on dry ground.

Waiting for wheat to grow, while you're afraid to move is a very, very unpleasant thing. At first, you're quite tense, but after a while, boredom sets in. There's a part of you that just wants to stow everything in a chest and commit suicide so you can reincarnate with full health, but it feels like cheating, somehow. Worse, there are rumors of worlds where when you die, you cannot go back into them. I wanted to mature myself to where I could live in such a world for a long time. To simply give up because of a little misfortune seemed too easy.

Eventually, I had enough wheat to start healing again. I made a larger plot in my little hole, then ventured out for more seeds. Along the way, some chickens started following me. I killed one, but brought the rest to my hole and sealed it up. With two chickens, I could start growing my food supply faster. I would wait until I was well stocked before I ventured out again. Perhaps things were not as bad as I'd first thought.

It was a slow process. I didn't have a bucket to bring water to my little field. I collected every egg and tried to hatch it, so the chicken population grew while my supply of wheat stagnated. I lit up the chamber as best I could, and waited. I waited so very long. I needed food so I could move freely about. With food, I could face skeletons for bonemeal to speed up the process. With food, I could go dig for iron. But instead, I waited.

Spiders are the worst. They sense your presence beneath the earth and refuse to leave. Instead they hound you, hissing incessantly as they wait for you to emerge. Zombies are bad, especially when they swarm towards you, but hiding under the earth as spiders hiss overhead is horrible.

Eventually, I had enough food and supplies that I felt confident in leaving my hidey-hole. I killed a stray spider, creeper, and then, in a fit of overconfidence, charged a creeper with a wooden sword. After working so long to stay alive and safe, I died. I felt that I had failed something important. I wanted to try my mettle in a world where I could make no mistakes. I would leave this world as my failure, never to return.


	30. Hopper Pipe Madness!

I entered a new world, knowing I could never be reincarnated in it. There was a sense of fear, especially after my last failure. I was standing in water, with cows and forest around. I quickly took down a tree and made my tools: a sword, pickaxe, and axe. I took down a couple more trees, and then assaulted the cow herd for meat. I would NOT be running out of food without a fight.

Next, I ran to an exposed hill and dug in. I would NOT be getting caught outdoors, either. I quickly carved out a small room, and then expanded it into a larger room to start an indoor tree farm. I intended to move back outside, but for now, I would have to be defensive. I had food, a home, and access to plenty of supplies. I intended to make this work.

Finally! Checking on the two multi-person worlds resulted in me getting back into the old world. It was incredibly nice to be back among all my friends. I made a beeline for a new location and ended up on an island in the middle of a huge ocean. I recreated my faction and quickly claimed four chunks of territory in a square.

My skills and money from before the world had reset were still there, so I made good use of it. I bought a TON of stone bricks and quickly had the first floor enclosed. I quickly set up a second floor as a farm, and then went to the nether for glowstone for glowstone lamps. Surprisingly, the stray nether portal I'd found was the exit to my nether road. Yes, it still existed. It went all the way back to my old base.

I had a new base, but I was still pleased to see my handiwork around. The nether portal was right next to the new spawn, which resembled an airport, complete with three airplanes. The gods had done a good job of building a new welcoming area. I got plenty of glowstone, and started on the next floor: a tree farm. I was spending money, but it was worth it to get up and running quickly.

I even had a god mine in my new mine, and give me half his findings. It included over a stack of iron ore! Things were kicking into high gear, and I'd be able to start working on automation, soon.

Interestingly, with nobody in a faction, people were scrambling. I created my own, of course, and had one of the people who loved warring on others begging to join my fac... again. However, I had two others who had been very helpful to me in the past request admission. Those, I accepted. People who help me without asking anything in return, I will help in kind.

The next thing I worked on was eliminating the water in my base. About half the territory I'd claimed was actually open ocean. First, I set up stone brick walls down to the ocean floor. Second, I used signs to give me breathing room under the floor. Then I took the bits of sand I had acquired so far, and started dropping it to create pillars. I would claim some space with sand, then dig it out, leaving a wall to hold back the water.

Steadily, with the help of one of the gods, I eliminated the water under my base, replacing it with open air. I was also accumulating enough sand to have all the glass I could possibly want. I was very pleased.

This time, one of the factions that had always had nice people in it decided to go peaceful as well. This cost me one of my members as she returned to her original faction. There were no hard feelings, though. I proceeded to tunnel out the basement to make room for an auto-smelter. The resulting cobble was smelted into stone for stone bricks. Those got used to encase the tree farm above. Above that became the first faction apartment, which I gave to my fac member to decorate.

A while after that, I found myself locked out of the faction world, so I went to the other multi-person world. In this one, I had slightly different concerns. I really needed a storage system, but if my base were discovered, it would get raided in a heartbeat. I made a simple decision: I dug a channel to a concealed chamber, and rigged up sticky pistons to seal the entrance. I had two buttons for opening and closing the door that I obscured near the ceiling. Finally, I put a switch on the other side to lock it shut, as needed.

I soon returned to faction world. I began working on a massive smelting sorting system. My goal was simple: have a single chest you could dump stuff in, and it would cook food, smelt ores, cook cobble, sand, and wood, and funnel charcoal into the furnace as fuel, even if it had just been cooked. Anything else, along with smelted results, would then funnel into an auto-sorting system.

I put a chest on the main floor that fed into a sorting system. It sorted cookable items into one hopper line, charcoal into another, and everything else into a third. Initially, I didn't allow enough slots for items I wanted to cook, and had to shift my furnaces over two slots.

After getting that working right, I set up a christmas tree-like dropper-vator, and hooked the third input line into the top of it. It made an annoying clicking, but I decided to live with it. This fed into another sorter. The first item caught charcoal and sent it back to the furnace.

Finally, I started the main sorter. Each item had six double chests capacity. I finished off the second wall of my system, and intended to curl it around the third wall and then pipe it downstairs for another three walls worth of storage. I also made a point of using a new version of the sorting circuit that couldn't generate feedback on overflows.

The worst part of all this was I was burning through cash like mad. I was buying buckets of iron for hoppers, because I just didn't have the resources collected for it, and didn't want to take the time to collect it all the hard way. I was using dozens of stacks of iron. The result would leave plenty of space for a brewing/crafting/enchanting/etc station. I was very pleased. Once everything was built up, I would wall things off and create access doors to service areas.

Along the way, I finally admitted another member to my faction. It was the guy who liked fighting, but had also been quite helpful. I knew it was a risk, but he'd lost everything, and had always been trustworthy when given privileges to help me. It was strange having members in my faction, but they seemed more interested in having a place to stay, than in helping. At least my newest member actually did useful stuff.


	31. Hardcore Panic!

More members! I was up to four assistants, and they were doing work! The simple concept of creating rooms and putting stuff in them was catching on. One member put together the shop I'd been planning on. Two more were mining down to bedrock and putting in the stone brick walls I was so fond of. Meanwhile, I started the second level of the mass sorting system.

We figured out how we'd handle the shop fairly: people who wanted to stock it would "sell" into the chest. One member with a large wad of cash had his name on it, so he would stock normally. The one thing that was starting to annoy me was that the filters for my smelter tended to glitch out, and flush EVERYTHING into the furnaces, which promptly clogged. It was clear that the system was normally working, so I wasn't at all clear on why it would glitch out. I suspected it was redstone glitching when I teleported away or back. It is a somewhat mysterious material.

Next, one of the fliers decided we should fix the mob farm. Working together, we got it working and added two layers. In addition, I set up half-slabs over hoppers to retrieve all the loot to a chest for us. Now all we needed was an enchanting table. I bought that rather than try to deal with a lack of books.

I worked with that same flier to finish up the sorting system. We now had more capacity than items to sort. I thoroughly enjoyed having someone who could help me intelligently with projects. He then put in feed pipes from the farm and tree farm so we could drop stuff off for sorting without moving from work.

We started to expand down below the animal farm when I suddenly realized it was too large, according to my GPS. Someone had claimed extra land, instead of getting the dimensions right. With some careful work, we got the room resized properly and unclaimed the excess territory.

It was after that that a lesser god called me up for a "surprise". It was a large pad of iron ore, two deep, and a magical pick that could get around ten to fifteen diamonds out of each ore. The result was nearly a chest of diamond blocks. I was filthy, stinking rich!

It made me nervous. I was on the list of people in consideration for godhood. Moreover, the lesser god wanted this to be a gift for me, but I had four other people in my faction with me. This many free diamonds just didn't feel right. One of the senior gods was around, and I showed him the situation, and requested his opinion. I soon had a lava pit to destroy them in, which I did.

It was remarkably hard to get rid of them all. Despite that, I did it. It was better to have a clean conscious than to be wealthy. Besides, one harvest on my tree farm would let me buy several stacks of diamonds if I wanted them. I had already been bankrolling my faction heavily. I didn't mind doing so more.

I decided to spend some time on hardcore world. It's interesting to go from having all the resources you could reasonably want, to having almost nothing. I had a tiny tree farm in a 7x9 plot of land. I expanded that to 9x9 as my first priority. I spent nights in my hovel killing hapless zombies that got too close. On around my third day, I was out harvesting a tree when a zombie dropped next to me from nowhere. Before I knew it, I was barely alive. I retreated to my hideyhole.

I soon saw that I could plant nine trees in my little tree farm, and did so. My next issue was that I needed something better than stone tools, and I wanted my food supply indoors. I started digging down at an angle, very carefully. I soon ran out of torches. I was burning wood for charcoal again, out of desperation, this time.

A short distance below my mini tree farm, I started working on a small indoor farm. I created a four block high 9x9 chamber. In the final corner, I struck iron! It was good, because I needed a bucket. I wanted a 3x3 water pond in the middle, and had already put torches above it. All I needed was to plant wheat in it.

I spent a day outside collecting seeds, and soon had the indoor wheat farm well under way. I put stone half-slabs around the the outside of the water pool to create a well that seeds and wheat couldn't fall into. Across from it I built a sugar cane farm. This was also a 9x9 room, but it had strips of slabbed over water to irrigate the cane.

Going down, I built a stairway all the way down to the lava layer. I could hear hostiles here and there on the way down, and found some iron (finally!) and redstone on my way down. I had a secure home with basic supplies. Now I had to think about priorities again.

There were still a lot of cows around outside. I could use an indoor cow farm. A sheep and chicken farm would be good, too. I would really like to find carrots and potatoes, but I still didn't have any armor, so that wasn't likely to happen any time soon. I was also missing pumpkins and watermelons. Ultimately, I needed a lot more iron, and a lot more wood. I was finally feeling calm, instead of panicky.


	32. Creepers Suck!

Back in fac world, I decided it was time to work on my repair skill. I couldn't repair normal diamond tools for free yet, and it was getting really annoying. Whenever I needed cash, I would end up damaging four diamond axes, and if I wanted to merge/repair them, it burned through a bunch of experience I usually hadn't collected.

I got an iron axe and a bunch of iron ingots for repairs, and made an iron block as my repair anvil. I harvested my tree farm, repairing the iron axe regularly, and then went out to collect various types of wood other than oak. I ended up with a nice sampler of birch, spruce, and jungle wood to go along with the charcoaled oak.

Shortly before I was able to repair my diamond tools, I got over-ambitious and the iron axe snapped. With a sigh, I made another one and kicked myself. It wasn't long after that that I was able to finally start repairing diamond tools. With that key breakthrough, I found my skill rapidly increasing. Soon I was able to attempt the repair of enchanted items (though I'd be a fool to try it).

With that accomplished, I turned my sights onto a new project. I wanted a villager trading system. I had a design I'd developed in my god world, and I thought it was time to make it a reality. I carefully started crafting it, and soon ran into a problem: no slime balls. None. Not a single one. And I needed three sticky pistons for each slot. Worse, it was nearing the new moon, so slimes wouldn't be out.

I was reduced to chopping down my forest to kill time until I could get slime balls. It took many, many days to accumulate enough slime balls, but I finally had all the sticky pistons I needed. I took that and built out my trading hall... and started cursing myself. I'd put the trading cells too close and cross wired them. I had to move them one block further apart.

I finally rebuilt everything and then built the room around it. I had to put in a stairwell up from the tree farm, but that was okay. I also put in a bunch access doors in case anything went wrong, like a piece of string I forgot to put in. I now had a small trading hall that I could use to get some serious goods. Now I just needed villagers for it, and to complete the ejection system.

Suddenly, I realized that I'd made an error. I had made the villager floors for the spawner too close together. I had to move the upper floor up one block. I then spent a long time waiting for a zombie villager to appear inside. Spiders appeared, normal zombies appeared, creepers appeared, but no zombie villagers. Finally, I got bored.

I went hardcore. I started doing a little caving, and got several diamonds. I ran into a section where I could here zombies, and decided to beat a retreat. Instead, I decided to make a little cow pen to round out my food supply. Unfortunately, there was a skeleton in the water outside my front door. I decided to try to deal with it right after sunrise and get my cows.

Let me enumerate the mistakes I made. First, I had eleven iron and eleven diamonds, but no armor on. Second, I only had a stone sword. Third, I was trying to fight a skeleton in the water. Finally, when I retreated behind a tree to heal, and this is the big one, I didn't see the creeper that snuck up on me. BOOM!

It had been a nice world. I was making good progress, I thought. I had had visions of building a wall, turning the mountain into my personal castle, and taking hazardous journeys into the nether. I had been thinking about creating an enchanting table and starting the process of enchanting my equipment. I had a nice tree and sugar cane farm to start making bookshelves for it.

Instead, I lay bleeding on the ground, experience orbs floating around my head. I never saw the creeper that got me. I couldn't even lift my head to take a final look around. As my world grew dark, I knew that whatever world I awoke in next would be just as hard, and completely different.

Creepers suck.


	33. Villager Trading

Back in faction world, I decided to find a new location for a base. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I was feeling cramped, and dissatisfied. I was considering giving my faction (under a new name) to my second in command. There had always been something gratifying about being a solo adventure.

I went to spawn and hopped into the nether. I picked a direction and started flying. I discovered something interesting as I flew: the nether is mostly interconnected chambers over the lava seas. With flight, I was able to make very good distance in a short time.

After a few thousand blocks, I set up a nether portal in a secluded spot and went back to the overworld. I had expected to appear on the surface, but instead found myself in an abandoned mineshift. Working my way to the surface, I broke through the ocean floor and swam to the surface. This was NOT what I'd had in mind.

I flew. It took me about twenty thousand additional blocks to get to land. I marked it as home, and started exploring. I was now over a hundred thousand blocks from spawn. When my second in command showed up, she did not want to accept ownership. She wanted to be in MY fac, not own what I'd created.

We explored together, and decided that she, the other flier, and I might just have to make a secondary fac base there, for just the three of us. We could leave the old base as the "official" one, and work on this for ourselves.

During this time, the thief who had been begging for admission to my faction suddenly announced he'd become a god! I found myself wonder what on earth the high gods were thinking. Eventually, he insisted on me inviting him into my fac, rather than simply joining via his god powers. With a sigh, I did, and my second in command promptly kicked him out.

That's when things got really weird. Rather than simply rejoin, he started demanding one of us invite him back. It was about that time a known god appeared and informed us the thief was lying. My faith was restored in the high gods, and a new rules was added for our faction: no liars/thieves allowed.

Another issue that came up was my villager trading system was broken during a demo. It was broken before that, but I hadn't realize it. Worse, I had yet to get a single zombie village to heal. I decided to just tear the whole thing out. I could build one at my new site.

My next project was to start digging a new layer on the basement. Soon, my hard working member showed up and started inquiring about cleaning up our membership rolls. She kicked two people out. Soon, the "new god" asked, yet again, for membership. He was not pleased when I simply said "no" and my head-knocker (as I now think of her) let him see the new I'd put up: no thieves or liars admitted.

It is interesting to see someone whine when he is suddenly faced with the consequences of his choices. He pleaded. He complained that being banned for one lie wasn't "fair". He denied ever being a thief. I didn't engage his arguments, but my head-knocker seemed to take great delight in both debating him, and in inserting herself despite his desire to speak only with me.

For myself, I found it amusing to sit back and let them talk. I had already made my ruling, and my head-knocker actively disliked him, unlike my mere distrust of him. My responses tended to be quite short and simple. He was a liar, the rule was no liars, I would not admit him.

Finally, our flier appeared, and we began working on a new "officer's base". Since the flier had a job as a builder, we let him do the construction while we got supplies for him to work with. We were going to be keeping this private. Only the gods would be able to visit us. Soon we had a base claimed and established, and began working on capturing zombie villagers again. This time, there was all the space in the world for them to spawn.

It turns out I only caught one that way. While I was lighting up caves to force zombies to appear on the surface, I found a zombie spawner. All I had to do was wait for a zombie villager, then lead it up to where I wanted it. Nice and simple. After that, I cured it. I had three little villagers in containers in no time!

The next step was to carefully drop them into pools of water at the right heights. That proved pretty simple. Then I put together a pretty standard canal system to route the adult villagers out of the unibrow breeding center (babies can't make legal trades, you know) and up to the trading bins.

My flier helped me assemble the trading cells. We ended up with space for ten of them, including a small optimization on the redstone. This time, they worked flawlessly, as I built them up layer by layer. Excess villagers and rejects were dropped off a cliff from near cloud level down to nearly sea level. I had a chance to watch a few of them splat to their deaths. In no time flat, we were scurrying around for paper and wool to trade for emeralds. Our various farms were proving most useful.

While I had been catching zombies, my flier had been working on another project to generate interest: a parkour course on the side of our main base. Prizes ranged from one thousand dollars to thirty thousand. I soon discovered that I was better suited for logging and redstoning than parkour. I never did manage to win the thousand dollar prize, despite handing a few of them out. I was content to harvest our tree farm for prize money.

The most interesting twist, however, was that it appeared our flier had been granted godhood. Even better, however, was that one of the elder gods was impressed by my sorting system. I was very, very pleased. My next project would be an easy one: a garbage disposal system over a lava pit, so people wouldn't accidentally fall in.


	34. Enemies Appear!

It turned out my next project was actually an automated chicken farm. This happened for two reasons. First, I was seeing good trades for raw chicken. Second, someone turns the lava pool I had spotted into obsidian.

I had to move the chicken farm twice before I got the placement just right. It had a tiny cell of "mama" chickens on top. Their eggs fed into a dispenser via hoppers. This was rigged to fire them into the lower "breeding" cell. In addition, once a day a daylight sensor would disable the dispenser and then crush all the adult chickens in the breeding cell. A little while after retracting the crusher, the dispenser would be unlocked. The wiring wasn't very elegant, but it did the job.

It was after one of my usual blackouts that I discovered we had most of a beacon at each base. I finished off both of them at full power. Stepping out, I noticed something very odd. At the main base, my flier had been building an external shop. It was claimed by another faction. I wasn't aware of having anyone who was annoyed with us, so it seemed very, very odd.

At the secondary base, looking more closely, there were craters just outside our base. The craters were also claimed. Suddenly, I suspected I knew what had happened. One of the people we had kicked out had set the secondary base as his home. It seemed clear he was holding a grudge.

There was no serious damage, but it was annoying. Fortunately, the head of this "enemy" fac soon showed up, and I was able to coax him into unclaiming the external shop. I quickly claimed it for ourselves. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do about the craters. The reality was that they people simply couldn't claim enough territory to seriously hamper us, especially since two of us could fly.

I saw a few choices, ignore the annoyance, pack up the outpost and move it, or offer to build something for them, in exchange for them unclaiming the territory. The problem was, I couldn't trust them to not have their personal homes at my outpost. Negotiating with treacherous people is never a good idea. Of course, I could go back to my other idea of abandoning the faction to one of my officers and starting over again. It also appeared that my flier had not actually achieved godhood yet.

A bit later, one of the high gods removed the craters, though the land remained claimed. The former member of my faction was soon spotted in the area, which confirmed my suspicion that he was responsible for the annoyance. I decided to spend my time on better things: like building fishing stations.

I soon discovered that I had two problems: first, there was some tension between members of my fac. Second, we often weren't in this world at the same time. There were two members who I rarely saw at all. I needed a way for us to all communicate effectively. I soon got an idea: written books. I made two books and two item frames.

The main base had one book with a friendly message inviting input from people. The officers base had a similar book, with more focus on getting organized. My hope was that with a communication channel, people could air their issues and get them addressed.

It was amazing how much of a pain having people in my fac could be. To say it was frustrating was an understatement. Saying "no" all the time had been far easier than trying to manage people. Worse, I was running out of ideas for things to do.

I decided to kill some time by by digging out my basement. Part way through that, I ended up building a secret exist for someone else's base. It wasn't overly secret, but it worked. I also had a request for membership from one of the demi-gods who had caused me so many issues so long ago. While I didn't trust him, others had surprised me by turning over a new leaf, and he'd mostly behaved for quite a while. I would discuss it with my officers.

Did I mention there were times when I really thought a solo act would be easier?


	35. Hide and Seek!

Sitting on a pile of money with nothing to spend it on is an interesting problem to have. I decided to do something fun with it. I bought nine stacks of diamonds and... held a DROP PARTY! It blew through a lot of my cash, so this was something I wouldn't do often, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, anyway. I could definitely see why the gods enjoyed watching us scurry around looking for a few scraps of diamond and gold.

I started some decorations on my own room, and also helped other people out here and there. Ultimately, what concerned me was the long time since I had last seen my flier. My head-knocker was starting to feel a bit absent, too, and my remaining members either hadn't been seen in ages, or never spent any time in the base.

Had I made a mistake in allowing others into my faction? Had I made a mistake in trying to use a faction as the key to protecting my things? To this point, my approach had been to build everything into a single, massive tower. While it had been effective up to this point, I was starting to realize this approach was highly constricting.

I thought about some of the other survivors I'd seen handle this strange environment. rippersteveM5 had a talent for building a single, sprawling base. He spent a lot of time on aesthetics, and built structures together to form a set of structures that formed a reasonably coherent whole. Dataless822 built colossal, massive structures that often had to be quite distant from each other just to allow them to not compete with each other for their glory. Tango Tek was an expert at creating automation and integrating them into an aesthetic whole.

These three men had solid survival skills, design skills, and redstone skills. They had different building styles, and different strengths and weaknesses within those skills, but they were all extraordinarily talented. One thing was for sure. I couldn't build anything I would be truly happy with in a tiny column, and if I got a huge team of people to claim that land, I would be spending so much time trying to guide them that I wouldn't be able to actually _do_ anything I wanted. The only alternative was to build without the protection of a faction, which would mean working in a very distant part of the world and protecting only the key items that I couldn't deal without.

My faction felt like it was falling apart, anyway. I needed to look carefully to see if this was going to hold together, or completely disintegrate. It didn't matter which it was, but I needed to come to a decision on what I would do. It was that, or retreat to a new private world and begin to build in a place where I could not be disturbed, or go to a new dimension of worlds. The sense of dissatisfaction was frustrating.

It was with this, that I started traveling through the nether again. I wasn't committed to leaving, but I knew in my heart what I was doing. I had decided to conduct a test: I left a book on the wall of the fac home, with instructions to sign it when read, and signed it myself. When I checked a while later, only one of the two people I knew had been around had signed it. I was disgruntled.

The nether journey was fairly uneventful. When I was satisfied, I popped up in the middle of a massive ocean again. The first real land I found wash a mushroom island. So was the second. I wasn't satisfied with either of them. They were too small, I wanted to sprawl. It took me another ten thousand blocks to reach the coast of a jungle. Roaming about there were extreme hills, taiga, plains, and forests. Everything I could want. I had given up on swamps, as I intended to find a slime hole deep within the earth for my slime needs.

One of the gods claimed the second mushroom island for his new home, and soon found himself having issues planting trees. For myself, I finalized the choice I had already made, and gave ownership of my faction to the one individual who was active and concerned with its goings-ons. My new faction would be "TheHermit," with the simple description, "go away."

No sooner was that settled, than my neighbor god asked to join. I would have said no, but there were a few demigods who had been nuisances in the past, and I couldn't really stop him. Besides, we respected each other, and weren't really looking to get anything from each other. We settled down to establishing our respective homes. Mine was a three by four room that was only two blocks high. It had a bed, work tools, locked chest, and locked door. I claimed the land for good measure, but intended to do most of my building outside that area.

My next priorities were establishing a tree farm, and a farm. At some point, the two hermits would have a nether road linking our homes, but that was something I was in no particular hurry to create. It would come in due time. I made solid progress on both, which made me very happy.

While working on these, the new owner of HermitCats suddenly became aware of what had happened, as did everyone else, including my former flier who suddenly found himself under new ownership. It turned out my former head-knocker didn't _want_ to own a faction. My eternal beggar and faux-god was quick to offer, even plead, to take it over.

It was interesting to watch the chaos as people tried to figure out what they wanted to do, where their interests lay, etc. to call it chaos would be an understatement. I refused to do much, other than suggest that if the head-knocker didn't want it, the flier would be the next logical choice.

While all that was going on, I set up the new faction home right next to the shop of the world. My goal: make THAT be our shop, and also ensure that if anyone else joined, they would have to figure out a home on their own. I built the first floor chamber, and decided to wait a while to make sure I wasn't about to irritate the high gods. There was no point putting too much into it if it was just going to be torn down.

I spent some time spreading my farm, when the telepathic channels suddenly became flooded with irate thoughts. Someone had been griefed, and got revenge on the culprit. Repeatedly. With a sword. Because it was a demi-god, this caused quite a bit of consternation, and soon the only thing I could hear in my mind was the noise of cursing, plotting, and vengence. It made the begging I'd recently heard sound calm and reasoned.

I spent some time mining, and soon found myself running out of storage space, and space to keep storage space. It was time to put my plot into motion. I created a platform high in the sky, and put a bunch of chests on it, all locked. I then moved a lot of my bulk items to that storage area.

After that, I found myself ensnared in a game of hide and seek. There is something surprisingly fun about a simple game of hide and seek. No fighting, no malice, just simple cleverness in hiding and seeking. It was probably the most fun I'd had in ages.


	36. World-Shaking News

My next step was to build a birch and spruce farm. I had a jungle nearby, so I didn't feel like setting up a jungle tree farm. I picked a nearby hill and did a ton of terraforming to get a level space to work on. After that, I began working on my new shop. The ground floor was simple: all things wood. Saplings, logs, and wood planks were soon in place. For the second floor, I offered a variety of foods. I even put together a chicken farm and was able to offer raw and cooked chicken, as well as feathers.

Shortly after that, I found my resources dwindling as another farmer began selling his goods into my shop. He was helping make sure I would be well stocked, with no effort on my part. I believe in buying and selling at the same price. Producers profit fairly, and don't have an incentive to undercut me on prices. I get the relief of not having to work as hard to keep inventory stocked, as others began buying. With my choice of location, I was basically setting the economy for these products in this world.

The big news, however, was that there would be a new high god from among us. Many were ineligible, for various reasons, but it _was_ a source of great excitement. I had to admit, I found the idea intriguing, but couldn't imagine what kinds of great responsibilities would be involved in being responsible for sustaining a world. Since I did appear to be eligible, I inquired about the responsibilities.

Just as I was finishing my initial work on the shop, there was an alarm. Our resident chicken guardian had an explosion of chickens in her sanctuary. Someone had bred them to a ridiculous level. When she opened the door to get in, they instead escaped. The result was a massive chicken hunt that extended into night, with zombies, skeletons, creepers, and spiders confusing things further.

Soon, I found myself conversing with the inheritor of HermitCats again. She wasn't happy being basically alone in the old faction, and wanted me to return as leader. I, on the other hand, was quite happy being functionally alone, with one of the gods joined with me in the distance. When she expressed concern for how I'd given up so many resources, I finally consented to show her the reality.

The new farm was already larger than the old one, to her amazement. The tree farms were much the same, and chickens were also more numerous. I was willing to let her remerge with me, with the old base as her private home, but I simply wasn't interested in building a community again. I needed space for my projects, and I wanted to build them as I saw fit.

The one thing that stunner her more than anything else was my home: a tiny room full of chests and furnaces. At first, she thought I was kidding when I told her it was my home. It took a bit for her to realize I was completely serious. The reality was that she is a social person, and likes to do group projects. By contrast, I am friendly, but not overly social.

During all this, the god that had joined my faction was happily harvesting and replanting supplies for his own base, which was exactly the sort of cooperation I actually enjoy. He was respectful of the parameters of the base, while he prepared to create his own farm to meet his needs.

I soon found myself with a second god in my faction. This one tucked himself into a little island and used his powers to craft a homey den for himself. Meanwhile, I found myself running into a rather simple issue: I wanted to start making larger structures, and they would require sticky pistons.

For that, I needed slimes. I started digging around while using sensors to detect the right conditions for slimes to appear underground. Soon I had found a suitable location, and I began creating a tiered system that would allow me to harvest as many as I needed. It didn't work very well, but that was because I had tons of caverns unlit around it. I then spent days exploring them and lighting them with torches.

At some point, I decided I wanted to start selling other animal products than chickens. I sidetracked myself a little bit and created deep pens for cows, pigs, and sixteen pens for sheep. It didn't take long to have all of them filled, and the sheep color coded by pen. Did I mention the stupid sheep breed true to whatever you dye them? Think about that for a moment. Dye a couple sheep pink, and they have pink babies.

I had just finished that, when one of the demigods and his friends began a massive rampage on another faction. I was far away from it, thankfully, but it was... horrible. With a demigod backing them, but doing none of the work, the much larger faction was being decimated despite all their efforts to survive. Land was stolen, property destroyed, and all I could do was sit back and listen to the screams of anguish and glee through my telepathy.

It was the first time that I truly, truly wished I was one of the gods. I had no doubt the weapons being used were being artificially created. I had no doubt this was slaughter of the most unjust sort. And I could do nothing. Finally, one of the gods appeared and put an end to it, but it had been truly frightening.

With things finally calm, I could return to my new problem: I didn't have enough wheat capacity. Between cows and sheep, I simply wasn't growing wheat fast enough to feed them regularly. I built a massive bed about the same size as my existing farm just for wheat. I'd been saving up my seeds, and ran out at the half-way mark of the initial planting!

I continued with a few other, minor things. I worked with one of the gods to get a nether road set up to connect our bases. Then I started terraforming the extreme hill I was in to build up a massive platform for my oak tree farm. My goal was to checkerboard it with glowstone, but I didn't have the glowstone for that, yet.

During all that, one of the gods who had previously been banned was caught breaking into someone's locked chests. Soon there were accusations of stolen diamonds, and a huge furor arose. Once again, I found myself wondering what was REALLY going on, and had no way to investigate. Something was fishy in our world, and I hoped it would be resolved soon.


	37. Vast Cosmic Powers!

It happened again! The apparently rogue god was rampaging, this time with other gods rapidly appearing and attempting to control what was happening. Eventually, there was a mutiny and the various gods threw out the rogue god, stripped him of his powers, and began trying to recover from what had happened.

With peace settling in, I got my checkerboard patterned tree farm bed as a gift from one of the gods. She had always been kind to me, and it was labor intensive, to say the least. After that, I started reworking my small home. I moved my furnaces to their own room, and expanded them two a total of twenty five. I also created a dedicated storage room.

Just when I thought peace was returning, the rogue god was back with all his powers. This caused a great deal of consternation. He claimed he'd had some sort of multiple-personality incident with a younger personality taking over. Reactions ranged from accusations of lying to healthy skepticism.

While the story seemed odd, at best, I couldn't say for certain he was lying. What I did know, however, was that a mentally unstable god was every bit as dangerous to everyone's well-being as a malicious god. Having other personalities suddenly taking over his vast powers just wasn't acceptable. It was my belief that he needed to deal with his issues, whatever they were, before resuming the power of godhood. Alas, it was not my choice to make.

Through all of this chaos, there was another incident that seemed to have slipped past the notice of the warring gods. My former flier had a strange sword that could be used to kill a pig and produce more pork chops than what I'd expect from around a dozen pigs. It was a great magic, but I couldn't figure what was happening. I wouldn't have really cared, except he kept giving all the stuff to me, and I suspected it might be tainted with some sort of dark magic. I wasn't comfortable with it at all.

In preparation for what I might have to do, I set up a garbage disposal as part of my cobblestone generator. It was just a chest that fed into an auto-firing dropper over the lava for my generator. It gave me some comfort, though, that I could quickly dispose of anything tainted, or just get rid of any junk that I didn't want to keep or sell.

I finished off my bit of expansion with a double brewing station and a mushroom farm. I wasn't sure about the wisdom of the mushroom farm, as it meant having a dark chamber above my slime farm, but it seemed like the best approach I could take. It was while contemplating that combination of facts that I got my idea: I could put in a retractable ceiling!

The idea was simple, but expensive: put pistons in the ceiling and hook a switch to them. That way, I could lower the ceiling so the room was only one block high, which would allow mushrooms to grow, but nothing else. It was something I would have to look into it, but if I took on the challenge, I would also have to completely tear out the room and rebuild it.

All of these rooms were built off the dropshaft from my bedroom down to the lava layer. It was truly designed in such a way that most people simply could not navigate it easily. That suited me just fine, of course. I enjoyed making a base that would only be useful to me, and that was designed around my needs and desires.

I decided to just deal with any mobs that might spawn in my mushroom farm, since it would be too expensive to put in all the pistons. Next I went down to the nether. While we'd been building the road between bases, I had noticed a nether fortress. Upon investigation, I soon found that there were two blaze spawners right next to each other. Perfect!

I quickly crafted some extended potions of fire resistance and used them to work in safety to build a cage around the blaze spawners. My goal was simple: I wanted to keep them in a confined space so I could run back and forth between the spawners slaughtering blazes. It didn't take long to get the space confined and build a bridge from that to our nether road.

Along the way I had killed a few blazes. I used those blaze rods, along with slimeballs from my farm, to get six more potions brewed up. It was time to run my first test. I ran in, and started going nuts. The sounds of battle were unending as the helpless blazes did everything they could to stop me from slaughtering them, to no avail. When I finally ran out of potions, I had seventy blaze rods to my name. It was time to set up the potions supply section in my shop.

Soon after that, the head high god contacted me, he wanted me to join him as a high god, but asked that I be quiet about it for a bit. Suddenly, the inner workings of the world unfolded before my eyes. I could see the inner workings of how people entered and left the world, private conversations, everything!

I quietly observed things with new eyes, while concealing what was coming from everyone, even those who would soon be my peers. While I watched quietly, but attentively, a war broke out between two of the factions. I paid close attention to how the existing staff handled it, and often wished I was allowed to reveal myself.

I found I could also observe the world without being in it. It was truly amazing. After a short period of time passed, the high god came in to end a fight, and officially bestowed high godhood on me. This was quickly followed by rounds of congratulations.

Godhood was quickly met with the need to exercise careful judgment and fend off requests to be granted power. I decided to work on a structure in the spawn area for a while. I granted myself god status and began working. After a while, I return to mortal form... and plummeted to the earth with a splat. Important safety note: flight terminates when you exit god mode.


	38. Villagers and Veggies

Being a god sucks. Everyone, and I mean almost EVERYONE starts by congratulating you on your new powers, and then asks you to exercise them for their benefit. Fortunately, the word "no" is easy to repeat. I did allow more people to visit my home, however.

My next project was simple: start collecting villagers for a spawner. In the old days, this was a simple process. Now, I found myself regularly pulled away by various demands. Some of inner workings of the world were... tricky. I would try to make an adjustment a dozen different ways, and it wouldn't take. Finally, I would get it to take, and promptly forget for the next time.

Another issue that came up was problems with people fussing at each other. Peering back in history, it was clear that the "offended" party aggravated things on a regular basis. When I pointed this out, he became... irritable. I had almost straightened that mess out when I was suddenly booted out of the world by a newcomer.

Peering at what was happening, I saw people becoming gods at blinding speed. Fortunately, one of our gods quickly addressed the situation while I got myself back in the world. I saw huge lava balls where our airport spawn had been. With great irritation, I cracked my knuckles and got to work. I began rolling back time to before the lava balls had existed. It took patience, and the world shuddered as I worked. Soon, everything was restored except for our quiz for newcomers. I resigned myself to manually assisting them until we could get the quiz sorted out.

I began working on a villager trading center next to my base. While I was working on that, I saw my former flier abandon HermitCats. A bit later, HermitCats was down to the lonely owner. As I slowly built cells, she made the fateful decision to abandon it completely. HermitCats was no more. I had made note of its location, however, in case I thought it would be useful to visit again.

With the new villager spawner working, my next step was to get trade supplies. I decided to create a compact cow breeder, based on a similar idea to what I had with the chicken breeders. I started building the same thing for the pigs, when I suddenly realized it wouldn't work. Pigs are short. Maybe. I would have to carefully test it.

As soon as I started to work on that, chaos broke out. One of the fac skirmishes had broken out, yet again. Since the aggressors had a reputation for somehow violating the laws of the world, somehow acquiring illicit godly powers, I concealed myself and watched carefully. Sure enough, one that I had temporarily barred from the world was soon making impossible jumps to get at his cowering victims. In irritation, I removed him again.

I found myself forced to shadow multiple combatants, as the chaos spread from one set of combatants to another. It was exhausting. Soon, I found a way to relax: I could peer into the world without entering it, now. I went for a nice, quiet game in my world where I could not afford to die, and left a corner of my awareness in the other in case I was needed.

It had been a while since I'd been here. I was in a room I'd carved out, with a furnace, crafting table, and chest of meager supplies. It was dawn. I left to get some more wood, and soon found I had a problem: I'd lost my base. As the sun began to set, I walled in an alcove under an extreme hill. With a bunch of wood planking as one wall, I hoped I wouldn't lose this one nearly as easily.

Soon I was back in the multi-person world, and after sorting out another scuffle, I decided it was time to build a "big" farm. I was going for a variation on what rippersteveM5 had built: a tower with four channels in a cross shape, with each arm a 5x7 plot of land. These would be layered so that a single water source at the very top could be released to flush out all the arms from top to bottom. My intention was simple: I would have carrots on one arm, potatoes on another, and wheat on the remaining two. This would probably use up all the resources I had acquired so far.

As I started working, I worked out how to put in water and light it up. Each pad had water along the sides, with glowstone above either end of the water channel. With the closeness of the pads, only a two block high gap, and the walling in of the water channels, the sides of the columns were completely walled in. It was the ends that were open for access.

After I had about three layers built, I was very low on glowstone, and I had my former flier helping put in the dirt pads while I put in the end caps. Soon, one of the gods started helping out, as well. While this was going on, a demi-god built a statue of me. It was rather flattering, and put a real smile on my face. There was now a twenty block high statue of myself looking over the landscape.

As I took a break to survey my progress, I knew I had a problem. I was probably going to run out of resources well before I was done. I quickly recruited one of the other people to start gathering glowstone for me. I had noticed he was low on funds, and I wanted a LOT of the stuff. Looking at my reserves, and doing calculations, I needed just over six hundred more glowstone blocks to finish.

Fortunately, I had someone willing to fetch that for cash. I found myself working on harvesting stone and using it up on the towers. I had completely run out of dirt, too. Meanwhile, my former flier was building the storage area underneath the tower. At some point, we calculated the total land the tower would have when complete: 6300 plots of land harvested by one water source block and a bunch of hoppers and chests. Planting it would take a while.


	39. Out With The Old, In With The New

I took a break from my being a high god to visit a new world one of the people I was over promised I would enjoy. He'd worked with the other high god to create this realm. I appeared in the world and immediately noticed a few odd things. First of all, I had radar. Second, there was a volcano erupting nearby with a strange rock I hadn't seen before. Since it was night, I climbed onto the volcano to stay safe from mobs.

The night was fairly uneventful. I spent it knocking off zombies who got too close. With the dawn, I quickly went after the nearby spruce trees. With a decent supply of wood, I angled to a bare spot on my radar, which turned out to be a small quarry. Inside, I found... marble? The heck? There was also tin, copper, sapphires, and even uranium. I didn't know what to do with most of it, so I bundled it up and wandered off to find food.

I soon found a herd of cows that I slaughtered and then took of towards some odd, huge trees in the nearby jungle. There were the usual, tall, jungle trees, but there was also something that was wide and massive. After knocking a few chunks out of it, I could identify it as a rubber tree. I set up a platform at the top of the tree and lit it up for the night.

While I cooked the steak I'd collected, I did a little more research. I soon found a new area of my wiki that seemed to explain this. Apparently, this world had access to dozens of new gadgets and tools that I'd never seen before and was missing others I was used to.

Soon, my friend arrived and gave me something called "dark matter armor" that made the diamond armor I was used to look lame. He teleported me to him, and I saw an array of... something... around a massive hole in the ground that went all the way down to bedrock. He gave me a ring that let me fly but consumed coal. He gave me a strange bag that could hold a massive amount of goods, like a massive nether chest I could carry with me.

A little later, I built some furnaces to do a little mass smelting. He put down a "red matter furnace" that had better capacity and speed than all of mine together. Then I turned around and he'd put together a sorting system that I could have loved to have, including chests that had an insane capacity at the receiving end.

With my head spinning, I left to work on a sane project: finishing my farm and getting it planted. That was a very long, very tedious, and very slow process. It was almost as long, slow, and tedious as planting. Soon enough, however, I had the wheat wings planted, and my former flier had the storage system in order. I would probably never put anything this psychotic together again.

With my farm finally planted, I showed it off to a few people. This was followed by the most boneheaded move anyone has ever pulled on one of my devices: one of them hit the "harvest" switch. I watched in horror as fields of immature plants were washed away. With a deep sigh, I committed myself to replanting, as only someone with flight could do it efficiently. It went faster than the last time, because I had the process figured out.

With that done, I had sugar cane, melons, and pumpkins left to build farms for. I also still needed better versions of the cow and pig farms. I soon found something more shocking, however. My entire shop was gone. The other high god had been working on expanding the entrance to our world, and my shop had been less than... ideal... in appearance. I had lost some supplies, but was willing to chalk it up as a loss. I was building all this stuff for myself, anyway. I didn't really care about making money off it.

I decided I needed a break from godhood, dealing with others, and pretty much everything. I also needed to explore this new, alternate realm with strange materials. I appeared in a forest, and noticed immediately that my right arm was invisible. I appeared to be composed of... pieces and parts of other things. I felt normal enough, and went with it.

I grabbed some wood and then noticed the pigs. It was hard to notice them, as all I could see was legs with that same, strange distortion I saw on myself. Their meat was good enough, though. I eventually found a cave in a taiga and went into it. As before, I found lots of marble, copper, and coal, with a bit of iron. My first chest looked odd, too. Examining it carefully, I could see beds, and various other things in it. It was quite odd.

Soon I hit the mother load: a zombie spawner! The chests around it included buckets, a saddle, and miscellaneous other goods. I did some poking around, and discovered that diamonds would be the key to many of the things that looked interesting. I would have to mine deep.

Checking in on the world I was a high god in, I found the other working on a new mall. He had just finished the outside, and asked me to create the inside. I set up a two floor system with a set of restaurant tables on top of that. I hoped it would be well received once stocked.

There were also rumors beginning to circulate that the entire world would reset in the near future. There were rumors of new terrain that would be explorable in the near future, and there was trepidation as people considered the benefits of such a place, vs losing all we'd worked to create. I, for one, was more excited about new terrain.


End file.
